I had a great time!
CAD Camp in Salt Lake City Utah was held on last Thursday and was a small commute for me instead of a flight because I live in the greater Salt Lake area now. The event was sponsored by the local Autodesk reseller and training company of Prosoft and organized by AUGI (Autodesk Users Group International). Prosoft even had a few of their excellent top notch trainers teaching Mark Mates on Revit and Seth Cohen on Civil 3D.
I presented the keynote during lunch. I don’t think I have ever had to be restricted to 45 minutes and frankly thought this was impossible without someone hitting me in the head with a shoe at the 45 minute limit but I did it but had to limit my rambling geek speek and Q&A. I stayed the rest of the day to answer questions, and chat with customers. I also offered up during the keynote that since I am local to come and visit local customers and assist where I can in upgrades, installs, CAD Management discussions, lunch and Learn or other items. I sat in on some of the classes such as David Cohn’s 3D AutoCAD, Robert Green’s CAD Manager Discussion, Travis Jones’ Autodesk Impression, and Matt Murphy’s Tool Palettes class. All were exceptional and I always learn something new.
One thing that struck me and was mentioned by a few customers that had recently implemented AutoCAD Sheet Sets and Tool Palettes. This is one of the hidden gems for CAD Managers to increase the ROI (Return on Investment) with little effort. It allowed one firm to eliminate many plotting questions, steps, and problems with sheet sets and tool palettes set up by another CAD Mgr allowed the team to select only their specific standard blocks set for their layer standards regardless of their original name or locations saving lots of time. Another downstream benefit of using standards such as layer standards is other applications can use the data much easier for example drawings with layer standards are easier to style in Autodesk impression.
Well I have to get back to work and the nice 80 degree weather here and ton of things to do.
- I have a bunch of email to catch up with.
- A few presentations I will be giving down under in a little over a week in Australia/Tasmania.
- I have to buy new travel gear after having all of mine stolen in Costa Rica in February.
- The new Autodesk MyFeedback Community 2.0 codename “Alta” is in design and development to make a nicer navigation and features as well as adding local language support and this is a huge project that will go live this summer replacing the current MyFeedback site.
- Oh and I do have some blog posts on the top of my head I need to get down and published.
So much to do but also so much fun and challenges.
Congratulations to Mike Weaver of CH2M for winning the AUGI Top DAUG SLC competition.
S.Hurley’s photos AUGI CAD CAMP SLC 2007
