An organization’s engineering, manufacturing, and facilities documents, drawings and CAD models are a critical business asset. Many times, it’s the source of its competitive advantage in an industry, or critical information for safety or compliance.
Beyond design and build/production teams, organizations are facing increasing requirements to make technical information available to downstream users - users that are often non-technical. And to manage and maintain that information, and continue to make it accessible throughout what are often very long lifecycles – decades in the case of complex products, plants, facilities, etc.
The Formtek® Engineering Data Management (EDM) solution for Alfresco is comprised of certified product components that work in conjunction with Alfresco Content Services to provide enterprise users with secure access to all engineering information, including AutoCAD, MicroStation, and IFC files. Formtek EDM allows authorized users to quickly search for and view the latest engineering drawings and CAD models, as well as access historical versions, all within the Alfresco Share, ACA, or ADW user interfaces.
The optional Formtek Connector for AutoCAD provides integration between AutoCAD and Alfresco, allowing users to interact with the Alfresco content repository directly from AutoCAD.
The Formtek EDM Module and CAD Transformation Engine
- Custom transformers that render AutoCAD, MicroStation, and IFC file formats for viewing within the standard Alfresco Share or ACA/ADW application viewers
- Pre-configured Engineering content types, with view, edit, and search forms - Can also be configured to work with an organization’s custom content model
- Upon upload, extract text present in supported CAD files for indexing and content-based searching
- Upon upload, extract attributes present in AutoCAD and MicroStation files, including title block attributes, and map them to properties in Alfresco
- Updates attributes in the CAD files, including title block attributes, when properties in Alfresco are edited
- Associates the base drawing to its external references within the Alfresco repository
- The CAD preview rendition in Alfresco includes the drawing’s model space and all layout views in the form of a multi-page, high fidelity, vector PDF
- Display the current view, or all views of the base drawing, or the complete drawing with all its external references
- Generate and download or distribute a PDF rendition of the complete drawing, including its references
- Generate interactive 3D PDF renditions of supported CAD files, download and view in standard tools that support 3D PDF, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Export a base drawing along with its configured external references to a local Zip file
- Available for Alfresco 23.x and later on both Windows and Linux servers