It’s been a while since I’ve talked about AutoCAD WS, even though the application is proving hugely popular on its various platforms: whether inside a web browser or on iOS and Android devices.
There have been some really interesting capabilities exposed, lately, which are making it increasingly interesting to the development community. One, in particular, that I’d like to talk about today is the ability for AutoCAD WS to connect to sites supporting the WebDAV protocol. I’ve used WebDAV a number of times, over the years, mainly with ProjectPoint and SharePoint. It’s certainly possible to set up your own WebDAV server (thanks to Gopinath Taget for the link), and then connect it to AutoCAD WS, but I’m going to focus on the simple steps needed to link AutoCAD WS with an existing SharePoint site.
Firstly, though, let’s discuss the idea behind this capability. You can now store your DWG files in a central repository – albeit one that is in some way accessible via secure HTTP over the web – and AutoCAD WS can then open the DWGs directly from it. In the past I’ve used SharePoint behind our corporate firewall, but as it is now hosted elsewhere it’s really simple to set up AutoCAD WS to work with it.
Once you’ve logged into AutoCAD WS you need to select “Drawings” in the left-sash and then the “Connect” button at the top:
Then it’s simply a matter of entering the access information for your SharePoint site (I used spaces in my URL rather than %20 characters):
And with any luck it should just work:
Now you should have your SharePoint site accessible, just like any other folder you have inside AutoCAD WS:
On a related note, there’s an AutoCAD WS Facecast taking place at 9am Pacific time today (Thursday May 26th, 2011), for those of you lucky enough to be reading this in time. For more information on the agenda – and the chance to win a T-shirt – see this blog post.
For your convenience, you can view the Facecast directly below, without needing to log in via Facebook:
