Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Angel Espinoza of KETIV posts that the Autodesk 2005 products are no longer going to be supported, due to legal issues surrounding support for MicroStation V8 DGNs. This involves licensing for a component that Autodesk doesn't own. Autodesk 2004 products are unaffected, and Autodesk 2006 products contain the component on a separate disk in the distribution. Evidently with 2007 forward, Autodesk will have their own component in place to provide this functionality. Both excellent products, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, however I have so, so many times in the past needed that crucial interoperability between them. For this I always turned to the Intergraph/Bentley products to do a push to Autodesk, as opposed to importing, and it appears I will have to continue to do so for another few years more.

Microstation v8 introduced excellent Autodesk support, including georeferenced images, font conversion and other great functionalities and features, and there has historically been a strong rivalry between these two giants... I suspect there may be more to this story...

On another level, it also brings to mind the ESRI/Data Interoperability Extension third party component issue...


Thanks go to R.K. McSwain of CAD Panacea who pointed Angel Espinoza's article out... he posts lots of great tips for the CAD community and has been a great resource over the years...