Responsibilities of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority are vast, as they manage stewardship of federal port lands in and around Vancouver, British Columbia.
The port authority oversees and manages over 16,000 hectares of water, more than 1,000 hectares of land, and approximately 350 kilometers of shoreline, bordering 16 municipalities and intersecting the asserted and established territories and treaty lands of several Coast Salish First Nations.
The port authority’s mandate includes handling permits for all projects for proposed federal port lands use and is responsible for real estate management. It also manages infrastructure development designed to support growth and efficient operations.
In order to manage all this, the port authority maintains a repository of AutoCAD drawings. They have been AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D users for a long time.
Maintaining source drawings from many systems such as water, communication, electrical, storm, sewer, and more is what the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Spatial Data Group does on a daily basis. Team members create plans based in these systems and want to query features from each of them. One of the primary problems was that those features could be unintentionally removed from the source drawing if the user didn’t detach it before saving the working file. It could then be gone forever. The team really wanted a solution that could automatically create an audit trail displaying everyone who had modified a file.
Joe Hedrick, manager, Infrastructure Solutions for IMAGINiT, answered some questions for AECCafe Voice on how the port authority found a solution for tracking and safeguarding its CAD drawings in the form of Autodesk Vault.
