The AutoCAD Migration Toolbox

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4 The AutoCAD Migration Toolbox Main Entry: mi grate Pronunciation: 'mi-"grat,' Etymology: Latin migratus, past participle of migrare; perhaps akin to Greek ameibein to change 1:to move from one country, place, or locality to another 2:to pass usually periodically from one region or climate to another for feeding or breeding 3:to change position in an organism or substance 4:to move from one release of AutoCAD to the next to gain new features and enhance productivity. - mi gra tion /mi-'gra-sh&n/ noun - mi gra tion al /-shn&l, -sh&-n & l/ adjective - mi gra tor /'mi-"gra-t&r, mi-'/ noun Speaker: Shaan Hurley of Autodesk Beta Programs San Rafael California Course Description: A quick and painless migration is the key to any technology rollout. Understanding migration issues with new technology, including AutoCAD 2000/2000i, will help make your implementation much easier and help keep your downtime to a minimum. This course will provide you with helpful advice and information on migrating from previous releases of AutoCAD and AutoCAD-based vertical products to the 2000/2000i design platform. We will discuss general migration issues as well as the tools available in the AutoCAD Migration Assistance, followed by a general question and answer session.

5 Introductions Who I am. Who came here thinking they would learn all the ins and outs of migration in an hour and a half? There is no way to cover it all in a hour and half! Maybe if we had a week or two. Who came here to simply escape turkey leftovers or get free stuff? Who has already migrated to 2000/2000i?

6 Migration Migrations can be disruptive if done in haste without planning or careful consideration to all effected areas of your design and data chain. If you plan carefully and implement the new release with all steps taken you can quickly recoup the costs of migration and increase your teams productivity with the new performance or features in the new release. Remember you don t always have to be the first on the block to implement the new release. Take the time necessary to carefully consider all the positives and negatives.

7 Data Migration Data Migration: Do some of the people in your design chain rely on a particular version of file? Do you have applications that rely on a specific version? If so you can always implement customization for a dual format save or manually do this until others or applications are updated for the new format. The DWG format for AutoCAD 2000 and 2000i is the same. When you open AutoCAD Release 12 through AutoCAD Release R14 drawings, AutoCAD 2000 automatically converts them to the AutoCAD 2000 format. If you save AutoCAD 2000 drawings as Release 14 R14 drawing files, there is no data loss or changes. AutoCAD 2000 data is not lost when you save a drawing in Release 14 format. New features or objects stored in the AutoCAD 2000 format is round-tripped when saved in R14 format, unless in some cases the related feature is modified while in R14. AutoCAD 2000 data that is not supported in Release 14 are items such as multiple Layouts, lineweights, extended symbol names, is stored as a proxy object or extended entity data EED information in R14. When re-opened in AutoCAD 2000 it will appear the same with the features that round tripped back. Set PROXYNOTICE to 0 in R14 to prevent the display of the Proxy Alert dialog on opening one of these drawings. Not all data will be preserved for round tripping if you save to AutoCAD Release 13 R13 format so you could be loosing data. AutoCAD 2000 and 2000i cannot save directly to the AutoCAD Release 12 R12 DWG format. You can accomplish this by using the Migration Assistance tool the Batch Drawing Converter or you can save as R12 DXF in AutoCAD 2000 and 2000i.

8 Customization Migration Customization: You should implement the new release on a single machine and test your customization and determine if it is affected. You should also look over any available documented changes to the API. Autodesk always tries to prevent breaking any scripts or APIs but in some cases it may be unpreventable for various reasons. Customization includes making sure your custom menus work fine with the new release and that you have added new commands to them. You should try to implement your menus in partial menus instead of just editing the acad.mnu. Visual LISP was integrated into AutoCAD 2000 as well as some VBA enhancements. Some customization may need to e recompiled or modified for for the new Multiple Document Environment MDE.

9 Migration Training Training of personnel: You should plan on a quick orientation to get users familiar with changes in the new release. You should also try implementing plan some working lunches showing new methods and features of the new release to introduce the users to them and increase their productivity. So often we get a new release and continue doing tasks the same way as we did in the past release without investigating if there is a new method that automates the process. You must also understand that you will not see in many cases noticeable increased productivity overnight as it takes time to adjust and unlearn old methods even for the best AutoCAD users. There should also be time taken to review the possibility of some features you may not want used such as the ability to Refedit blocks or Xrefs or modifying configuration files such as network shared PC3 files or plot styles and how to prevent users from doing this

10 Hardware and Environment Hardware and System Environment: In some cases the new release may require new hardware considerations. When implementing a new release you should consider upgrading the system environments and their hardware to best take advantage of the new release. A case in point is now AutoCAD 2000i now supports dual processor configured machines so that may be something to consider if you are doing computational intensive operations such as 3D where more processor power means faster performance of the tasks. You should evaluate peripheral devices such as plotters for the latest drivers and firmware. It may be time to consider retiring the 1970 s era pen plotter that you can no longer get drivers or parts for. Upgrade your OS to NT based You know there comes a time when you need to ditch the Ox team used to plow the fields and get a tractor.

11 Planned Rollout Planned Rollout: Never plan the rollout to multiple CAD stations during the week. You should plan the rollout on the weekend or when it has he potential top cause the least disruption in your organization. Always have a contingency plan if the roll out does not goes as smoothly as expected. A side-by-side install is a good contingency when supported by the versions of products.

12 Migration Assistance AutoCAD 2000/2000i Migration Assistance is a set of utilities and tools delivered with the AutoCAD 2000/2000i software, that is specifically designed to bringing all your files from earlier AutoCAD releases up to speed quickly and painlessly. Batch Drawing Converter AutoLISP Compatibility Analyzer Menu and Toolbar Porter Command Alias (PGP) Porter Color to Named Tool Network Deployment Tool Serial Number Harvester ScriptPro Utility

13 Migration Assistance

14 This tool converts sets of DWG files to and from AutoCAD 2000/2000i, Releases 12, 13, and 14, and AutoCAD 2000/2000i. It previews files, includes new page setups, and converts penwidth settings to lineweights. The drawing batch converter is also very nice, especially with the ability to import pagesetups. We do use the drawing converter as well to make files backward compatible when we must UNMIGRATE files for our clients still on R14. -Robert Grandmaison

15 This tool helps prepare AutoCAD 2000/2000i and Release 14 AutoLISP files for importing into AutoCAD 2000/2000i. It inspects code for incompatibilities, suggests changes, and provides a LISP editor you can use to update your files interactively.

16 This tool brings your custom menus and toolbars from AutoCAD Releases 12, 13, and 14 and AutoCAD 2000/2000i into AutoCAD 2000/2000i. Tip from David Garrigues: When you use the toolbar porter it will not copy over the bitmaps. Do a search on your old search paths for *.bmp to get them transferred to the new path. Also, in the future to avoid this moving simply add a directory to the network then place all of your bitmaps in there. This way whenever you upgrade in the future you don't have to worry about loosing them nor will you have to worry about if your hard drive crashes and what you need to back up.

17 This tool quickly copies command shortcuts from AutoCAD Releases 12, 13, and 14, into AutoCAD 2000/2000i.

18 This tool changes color-dependent plot-style drawings to named plot-style drawings. These AutoCAD commands are only available if you installed Migration Assistance except in LT which the commands are built in. To install Migration Assistance after the original install run msetup.exe from the AutoCAD CD. Command: CONVERTCTB Converts a CTB plot style to STB Command: CONVERTPSTYLES Changes Drawing plot Style Mode CTB STB STB CTB

19 This tool automatically installs and configures multiple, customized AutoCAD configurations over a network. It includes a 30-day trial version of PictureTaker Enterprise from Lanovation. You can create a Change File by "taking a Picture" of a clean system, making whatever changes are necessary, and then finding changes. PictureTaker places all changes into the Change File. You can also build a Change File from scratch, allowing you complete freedom to build packages for your own purposes.

20 This tool creates a simple report of your networked AutoCAD seats, including their location, serial numbers, and more. It could be ran silently and It creates a log file which could be gathered by a network login script.

21 Use this utility to apply a specific set of commands to a list of drawings. Simply write a small script, specify the script file, and drag the drawings into the ScriptPro editor. This is a great utility. It can recover from a failed action and keep on possessing.

22 Future Migration No more large migration changes. The new Extension and Rollups will reduce the impact. No more will the change from one release to the next be like a snake swallowing a football but will be in bite size pieces. Extension Extension Upgrade Release extension roll-up

23 Open Discussion & Tips What pitfalls and solutions do you know? Do you have questions? Tips: BLOCKICON command to update the blocks for the DesignCenter use. Mikhail "Misha" Belilovskiy Recommend that people setup Color-dependent plot style tables in order to continue to plot their R14 drawings and continue the workflow without interruption. Then, as they become more comfortable with 2000, they can experiment with the new plotting features. -Greg Wesner Always start with a fresh system uninstall no upgrade path. -Me We even manually rebuild all of our profiles with each release. It takes a competent user about 15 minutes totally setup all their options to make a new install work properly. 30 minutes if they're slower...that's not a huge amount of time to invest in making sure that everything's working properly. Robert Grandmaison We also save all of our custom toolbars and the related bitmaps to a common folder that allows us to quickly copy any of the items we need to replicate them on other machines. Robert Grandmaison We save all of our custom toolbars and the related bitmaps to a common folder that allows us to quickly copy any of the items we need to replicate them on other machines. Robert Grandmaison VIEWTOLAYOUT and other Layout tools for migrating pre-2000 drawings to multiple Layout format. -Karen Mason There is a AutoCAD 2000 Express Tool (Mergelayout) to convert a drawing with multiple Layouts to a drawing with a single Paperspace with multiple viewports ala R14. Me Having support files such as pen tables, lisp, arx, and company standard menus on a network path, makes it very easy to update and control changes to our AutoCAD system. -Doug Cochran

24 Open Discussion & Tips cont. Tips: Since AutoCAD profiles (.ARG) are user login specific, It is good to have a Standard profile users can load from the network somewhere. Doug Cochran Many people think that the network deployment of AutoCAD is only for ADLM. When in fact, you can create a network deployment for stand alone AutoCAD as well. This will save an incredible amount of installation time. (i.e. CD desk to desk vs. deploying machines at once.) Also network deploy writes a nwclient.log file to determine which machines AutoCAD was successfully installed or failed on. Doug Cochran Dimension Tolerances have changed and now fully comply with ANSI requirements. As a result, your Tolerances may shift location a bit when opening them up in AutoCAD 2000 and 2000i Brian Webb When installing A2K or A2Ki on a system that has a pre-a2k product already installed, do NOT choose to migrate the previous installation! Coming from a tech support viewpoint, I can't tell you how many people we've had to walk through uninstalling and reinstalling because they chose that option, only to have bogus menus, LISP routines that don't work, etc. as a result. Matt Dillon Custom Installs: In the root of the AutoCAD 2000 and 2000i CD is an ASCI Text file called backup.lst. This file controls what is backed up to the backup directory when you use the migrate custom files check box. You could add your custom lsp files so that they get copied over on the install. The way to do this would be to copy the CD to a Network Server and then modify the backup.lst file. You could put in your custom lsp files so that they get backed up. Then point everyone to your CDROM master on your Network. Keep in mind you would still need to use your Serial Number and CD key on each standalone install. -Bud Schroeder Use the Layer States conversion utility from

25 Open Discussion & Tips cont. Tips: Network Deployment with custom.lst From the R14 readme, but it works with 2000 and 2000i: The AutoCAD setup application enables you to customize AutoCAD files or supplement the installation with files of your own. You must add a file called custom.lst to the Image directory in the client deployment location created by the Network Setup Wizard. If this file exists, the AutoCAD setup application will overwrite or add the files listed in custom.lst to the installation directories on the client workstation. The custom.lst file is a text file which must be placed in the Image directory. Each line contains a source file name and an optional destination file name, separated by a "greater than" sign (>). The file name can also contain a fully qualified path. Blank lines are acceptable, and spaces are ignored at the beginning and end of each line. If you do not include a fully qualified path, source file names are relative to the Image directory. You must copy the directories and files you reference in custom.lst into this directory. Destination file names are relative to the directory where AutoCAD will be installed. If no destination is provided, the source file base name with extension is assumed. When specifying source filenames, wildcard characters can be used. However, you cannot rename files using wildcard characters. The following is a sample custom.lst file. data\test.lsp > test.lsp t3.lsp > t4.lsp > t5.lsp MyCustomFiles\*.* > Support\*.* MyDrawings\*.* > MyLSP\Special.lsp > In this example, the custom.lst file causes the following operations to be performed: 1. The test.lsp file is copied from the Data directory in the Client deployment location to the AutoCAD directory. 2. The t3.lsp file is copied from the Client deployment location to the AutoCAD directory. 3. The t4.lsp file is copied from the Client deployment location to the AutoCAD directory and renamed to t5.lsp. 4. The contents of the MyCustomFiles directory in the Client deployment location are copied to the AutoCAD\Support directory. 5. The contents of the MyDrawing directory in the Client deployment location are copied to the AutoCAD directory. 6. The MyLSP directory is created in the AutoCAD directory and the Special.lsp file is copied into it. The AutoCAD directory is the directory that contains the acad.exe file.

26 Resources Discussion Groups User Groups Knowledge Base

27 Thank You! Shaan Hurley