My office wants to shift from a traditional physical network server to a cloud service through SharePoint/OneDrive (I don't even know the difference?).
Is there any documentation on MicroStation/Bentley requirements for such a thing?If anyone here is doing this sort of thing already, what sort of issues and pitfalls have you run into? What problems have you had to work around? I'm going to have a meeting with our IT folks (who are essentially CAD illiterate) and I want to have as educated discussion as I can.
We currently have our workspace on the network, pointed to by a custom configuration. In theory, We may need to simply redefine a half-dozen variables from M:CAD to...whatever the SharePoint address would end up. But is it really that simple?
(Yes, Bentley people, I know you want us to use ProjectWise products, but we aren't going to buy another software package when SharePoint is "free". Besides, we don't have anyone who could configure or administer those)
Thank you.
Thanks Mick, good point to highlight.
Some of the OpenNnn applications also have relationships between files that are not recognized by generalist document storage systems sync mechanisms, another aspect that ProjectWise Drive supports.
Regards
Marc
Hi Mary,Similar topic but I saw your post and remember coming across a Reddit thread:PSA.. Do not host AutoCAD files in Sharepoint : r/sysadmin (reddit.com)
The general thread appears to discourage CAD files being shifted to SharePoint, particularly when used with the vertical platforms like OpenRoads.
I recently saw SharePoint being used in a very well organized way to store project data by synchronising it locally (behaviour similar to OneDrive, they have many similarities).
On the whole it works very well except when multi user access is required. As there are multiple local sync'd versions if Alice and Bob both open the same file and make changes multiple versions will be saved to the sources in the format <fileName>-<machineName>.dgn, .dgnws, etc.
While SharePoint/Microsoft 365/OneDrive support multiuser access to Office file formats, this is not an option for DGN and supporting files. This is one of the issues that ProjectWise Drive was designed to resolve.
ProjectWise Drive supports transparent check in/out to enforce single-user file access.
It also understands the Bentley configuration system so if a configuration is stored in ProjectWise Drive it will locally sync configuration files as the applications demand them. To do this with SharePoint or OneDrive would require users to ensure that 'Always store on this device' was checked for configurations which can be a tricky thing to implement consistently.
When they decide on a solution, I will post it. At this point, I believe they are still researching options.
MaryB
Power GeoPak 08.11.09.918Power InRoads 08.11.09.918OpenRoads Designer 2021 R2
MaryB , would you mind sharing what your IT department decided on? We were hoping to use OneDrive/SharePoint too. From the thread it looks like this may not be a good option.