My company has two offices located several hundred miles apart. The
offices are relatively small in size, with 10 employees in one site,
and about 15 in the other. Both sites are using the same version of
AutoCAD.

Is there any product that can enable both the sites to work from a
single server, or would a Distributed File System (DFS) be a better
option? I'm mainly concerned about the File Locks and the Reference
Files, if using the DFS solution.

Is there a Document Management product available for AutoCAD?

I have both sites currently connected by T1s and a VPN.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks ,Gary

You can stay on Autodesk technology and use Autodesk Vault or Productstream for document management.

Gary,You say you have a VPN. Is that the only connection point between the two offices?Mathew

Gary,Autodesk Vault is the document management system for Autodesk products.
Shouldn't be a problem with your setup. Your WAN should work out just
fine.

Vault is _A_ document manager for Autodesk products, one of many. There
are other choices, (Adept, Columbus, Projectwise, etc) which may have
significant advantages in some environments.

In as much as Vault is not a profit center for Adesk, I'm seeing little
effort being put into making it a quality EDMS for AutoCAD.Mathew

Thanks for the help here. If using the DFS with Riverbed
Steelhead and DocuVault the way to go then? Do you have 1st hand experience
with this combination?

Take a look at the Riverbed Steelhead products.We've got Steelheads and they're good to a point, but with the advent of the new drawing format in R2007/2008 they can no longer transfer just the changed bits of a file, the way it worked with earlier AutoCAD versions. If you save or open a 2007/2008 file over the WAN that has changes, there is no acceleration. They're still good for other file optimization, email, etc.

These appliances increase WAN speeds about 5x the first time a file is
accessed (this is still about half the speed of the LAN). When the same
file is accessed second time, the speed is comparable to the LAN as
long as the file is still cached.

Besides this, you can refer their forum at:http://www.wdsforum.org/forum/index.php

One of our partners implemented Riverbed Steelheads some time back.
They told that the product was incredibly simple to install, and
demonstrated efficient bandwidth results and latency improvements.

Since the market review is demonstrating irrefutable response for
Riverbed's Steelhead Appliances, we are looking forward to deploy that.
Rather, their team is already being called upon for demo.

They do what they claim, but they are not going to make up for a bad
(slow) WAN. If you have not already, have your WAN analyzed also.

Well, you can view one of their performance briefs also that clearly shows how they are helping in improving the application acceleration. The link is as:http://www.riverbed.com/docs/PerformanceBrief-Riverbed-AutoC AD.pdfThanks, RMartin

Thanks a lot. We will definitely get our WAN analyzed first.

Is there any discussion area where we can put any query/ inquiry regarding this product?

For queries, you can visit the discussion group at the following link : http://www.wdsforum.org/forum/index.php

After IT deployed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile, our employees recognized the difference immediately. Files that once took more than five minutes to download when working in branch offices or remotely now take only two seconds, making download speeds that were once unbearable almost unnoticeable.To enable efficient data access and collaboration throughout our mobile workforce, we are looking to deploy Steelhead Mobile to the remainder of employees.

They
are proving themselves to be the leader in network acceleration. They help in
enabling reliable and regular complete network-based backup without interfering
with other applications that require the WAN.