Facilities and ArcGIS for AutoCAD

I have been making some edits to my facilities this summer; specifically to my floor plan. Or perhaps more accurately I have been remodeling the downstairs bathroom starting with removing the poorly installed tile flooring. I then added new wall coverings, replaced the vanity and all the plumbing fixtures. I had the new flooring professionally installed, but I did all the rest of the work with the tools I had in my garage.

I can use the tools in plain AutoCAD to edit floor plans stored in an ArcGIS geodatabase when using ArcGIS for AutoCAD, and a feature service being published by ArcGIS for Server. Here is a short video of me doing just that.

There you have it, a do it yourself “facilities remodel”.  Here it is bigger on YouTube.

ArcGIS for AutoCAD in the ArcGIS System

I dropped my wallet this last week at the Krispy Kreme donut shop. We were hosting some students from Guadalupe (FR) that had never had a donut. I called the store the next day and someone had found my wallet and gave it to the manager. I was first surprised that they had it, and intact. Then I was surprised that I was surprised. That is what I should always expect to happen when I lose something. The very next day one of the girls left her smart phone on the bus, but when we went driving to catch up to the bus still on the route the phone wasn’t there. She was in tears… upon further investigation I learned the girls had stopped at a Starbucks before boarding the bus and had purchased a beverage there. She convinced me that she had checked the time on her phone while riding the bus. …But she had two phones her personal phone with her smart stuff on it, but no service, and her dad’s phone with service here in the US, but she was sure it was her phone she had been holding on the bus, not her dad’s. A call to Starbucks and it became evident that someone had taken the smart-phone from the bus, crossed the street and took another bus in the opposite direction back to the same stop and dropped the stolen phone while purchasing a Frappuccino at the very same Starbucks, and someone there turned in the lost stolen-phone to the manager. ;)

One of the things I hope people realize about the newest free version of ArcGIS for AutoCAD is that the new feature service can make a huge difference in interoperability when working between ArcGIS and AutoCAD. My ability to access attributed vector data (even if I am just pulling information into AutoCAD) from ArcGIS for Server is going to give me huge freedom to interoperate with ArcGIS using AutoCAD. The ability to edit Geodatabases through feature services is something I will be doing a lot, because I am comfortable editing data in AutoCAD. I’ve been surprised while using it how useful it is. Then again I am surprised, that I’m surprised. Now that it is here it is what I would expect from client software to the ArcGIS System. The fact that the connections are over the web, in the end makes a huge difference in how and who can use the tool. The concept that the same web services are accessible by all other Esri software clients is why they call it a system. Below is a short video overview of ArcGIS for AutoCAD in the system.  Here it is bigger on YouTube.