So the remote desktop software works great for V6. I can’t say the same for Autocad. You can’t run Autocad from a server so you can’t use the remote desktop software for it. Since most of our implementation involves automating Autocad with the data from V6, that is causing a problem.
We have a custom Microsoft Access program that uses the data from V6 to drive most of our downstream processes. Reporting, extrusion optimizations, Autocad Cleanup, fabrication drawings, etc… The program works fine in the Fremont office where we also have the SQL server, but the latency in the other offices when working over the network was a real issue. We spent the week testing different data access methods and found some interesting things. If you try to copy data from SQL over the network to a linked table, the performance is horrible. If you copy the same data to an unlinked table, it is much better. The best performance came from using stored procedures or pass-through queries to fill a non-linked tab …

Started training the LA branch last week. We’ve recorded over 20 videos covering all the basic subjects and are using these for our training. This way people can go back and review things that weren’t clear or they can’t remember. I’ll try to post these in the near future.

The latest version of V6 has a much better implementation of their detail module. They are now using the open design alliance dll’s and the imports and exports are excellent! You have the choice of storing the details in the database or as a file on the server. We reviewed this yesterday in our weekly V6 meeting and it was very impressive. I still think we will use a hybrid method for our company. Export the generic details from V6, then roll through them programatically, see what assemblies were used to create the detail, search a database to see which of our standard details represents those assembly combinations then replace the generic detail with ours. I think this will result in less clean up for the draftsman.

Had an issue with the VRML to IFC converter. The VRML output is in inches and we were converting to IFC in inches also. This worked fine when you import it into Revit, but was not scaling correctly when you import into Navis. We changed the units to Metric and both imports work fine. Not sure why, but it works.

Finished the VRML to IFC converter. We can now export VRML files out of V6 and then convert them to IFC for direct import into Revit and Tekla. This was requested on one of our projects where they were looking for a way to import our work into Tekla. The DXF files out of V6 would work, but they wanted to be able to cut a section and see our actual extrusions and the DXF export does not have that sort of definition when it comes out of V6.

As we are looking to implement V6 at our other branches, we took a laptop out to Las Vegas and LA to see how V6 would perform over the network. Our SQL server is in Fremont (San Francisco bay area). Over the WAN, performance was less than stellar. We took one of our large quotes (360 quote items) and ran time trials in each location. A full save in fremont was running 6 minutes. Over the WAN it was over an hour. This obviously wasn’t going to work.
So we tried using the Microsoft Remote desktop that’s built into windows. We installed V6 on a server in the Fremont office then accessed it remotely using the same laptop. All time trials were the same as being local. Next I tried it from my very underpowered netbook using a Verizon wireless card. Again, exact same opening and save times!
If you are looking to use V6 in a distributed environment with one central server, this is definitely the way to go.