Review of S-MAN 6 - CAD Standards Manager for AutoCAD 2000-2005

David Kelley

S-MAN 6 puts the icing on the cake compared to all prior releases. There is no setup required to get the default system up and running. The latest in installer technology installs S-MAN resources to your AutoCAD locations and loads up all other resources from discipline specific shortcuts without altering any of your existing AutoCAD setup. Running the Un-install removes the S-MAN files.

S-MAN 6 CAD Standards Development Systems for AutoCAD are available for the 4 major AEC practices in both US Imperial versions for the US market, and in Metric versions for overseas markets. These products set you up with an operating system for AutoCAD with classified components allowing you to define and manage all of the options provided in AutoCAD with consistency. S-MAN systems may be implemented as a turnkey pilot operation to start, after which time you can assess, redefine, and maintain all components to suit business and staff requirements. 

Because S-MAN is a fully documented system, CAD manager's are provided with an expert training resource on how to configure AutoCAD standards in the most effective way, and you are shown how to get your staff to accept and buy into the procedures you implement.

When you install the S-MAN demonstration version, you will see a printme file that directs you to information explaining the S-MAN standards resources provided in the licensed version. For a Quick Tour and a brief explanation on the major parts of the S-MAN systems, you can open the "S-MAN Demo - Quick Tour" document from the root SMAN folder that has been installed on your computer. Preliminary information for CAD managers is found in the "CAD Manager - Implementation" document.

Placing your cursor over the S-MAN shortcut will tell you which set of operating standards the shortcut currently makes available to AutoCAD. If you need a somewhat modified alternative of your operating standards for a large project, you can copy the SMAN industry sub-folder and all of its contents from A20W**1 to A20W**2, make a copy of the shortcut, and change its target specification from the A20W**1 path to the A20W**2 path. Clicking on the shortcut will start your AutoCAD platform and load the CAD standards management system currently defined for your application.

You will see many new button bars and an S-MAN pulldown menu on the top menu bar. To clear your space, the long toolbar can be docked directly above the command line window at the bottom of your screen and you can close the other toolbars because they are linked to it. If you have downloaded the industry version for Municipal Works (Civil) US Imperial, a civil engineering demonstration drawing will be open in your graphics screen that looks like this:

To view Plot Previews with the 60 odd page setups that come with S-MAN, you will need to install the demonstration HP driver that comes with the package. It is located in the Sman\Demo folder and instructions on using the example driver are given on the demonstration drawing under the heading "Page Setups and Plotting". 

The S-MAN system comes with predefined job folders and for AutoCAD 2005 installations, a prototype "sheet set" setup that will link to the S-MAN standards components that come with the licensed copy. To view the prototype sheet setup in AutoCAD 2005, go to the File/Open Sheet Set menu and navigate to C:\Data\****\Jobs\Demo Job-*-000-000\A-Project Resources folder. Open the "Demo Job-*-000-000.dst" sheet set file. 

Right click on each of the headings in the sheet list, and choose "Properties" to view the links to the S-MAN standards components that will be used to create new sheets for your project.

All of the S-MAN standards components and accompanying source files that you can use to define them are too numerous to be described here. However by testing each of the S-MAN menu items and referring to the "S-MAN Demo - Quick Tour" document, you will get a good understanding fairly quickly. Remember that these are CAD standards definition files. Therefore you do not want them to be easily changeable (by a computer interface for instance) until you have made a fully conscious decision to do so in the documentation. From the online help, you can easily get up to speed on how to use this resource by going to the "System Setup topic shown below:

New in S-MAN 6

Some significant upgrading has been added in S-MAN 6. Specific items are listed in the "S-MAN 6 What's New" document located in the Sman\A20W**1\****Docu folder. This includes:

• documentation upgrades and system integration for AutoCAD 2005 platforms,

• automated casing changes for delivering a consistent standard to your customer,

• writing layer setups to standards files from a standard drawing,

• batch changing of plotstyle tablenames in page setups, and

• menu improvements. 

For CAD managers who have difficulty making time to upgrade and manage CAD standards, you will appreciate the enormous value here at the S-MAN.

David Kelley is president of BCN Communications Inc, specializing in web media solutions and community locator maps for government and municipal websites in the US and Canada. He may be reached at http://www.websitemaps.com

 

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