I am going through a difficult transition trying to move a client serverless, and finding current cloud solutions offered by MS are insufficient for storing .DWG files. Prior to deciding to move data to Sharepoint we reviewed this article from 2019 which makes it seem as though Autocad in Sharepoint is not only supported but integrated.
Autodesk AutoCAD and Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint
Based on this information we made the move and migrated their .dwg files to Sharepoint with the intent of leveraging the One drive sync client to give them the file explorer access they are used to when editing designs. The result however was lost work, and we later stumbled upon this very recent article from Autodesk themselves stating Sharepoint is not a supported storage location for Autocad drawings.
Same DWG file on Sharepoint can be opened multiple times with no read-only alert in AutoCAD (autodes...
The issue here ends up being that in a standard SMB environment with files stored on a server share a user can open up an Autocad file for editing and when subsequent users open the file, they will get a message that another user is editing it, and the file will open in read only mode. With the mechanics of Sharepoint and the one drive sync client neither user is informed the file is open and they can both edit, resulting in multiple out of sync files or lost work for one of the 2 users.
Sharepoint has a check out feature, that SHOULD mitigate this by forcing users to check out the files prior to editing it HOWEVER the checkout feature is not compatible with the One drive sync client and if any user is syncing a library with checkout enabled it will auto-lock ALL files within that directory.
With these concerns taken into consideration Autocad DWG files and Sharepoint are neither integrated nor a workable solution for any real-world scenario other than a single user environment.
I thought moving this data to the Autocad Drive platform would mitigate this, but that makes it worse. They offer another product called Autocad Cloud, but with those costs considered they may actually be eclipsing server replacement costs and make this move a less than lateral one.
I am writing this as a warning for other vendors who stumble across the MS article above to prevent the huge headache I am going through now.
Could Microsoft alter the article to be more clear that his is only supported for single user environments? Stating that there is no way to directly open DWG files in Sharepoint without risking lost/duplicate work in multiuser environments would have put the brakes on this plan.
Has anyone run into this before and found a solution that works for Autocad users without greatly changing the work flow they are used to? I'm all ears. Thank you.
