Legacy Decisions 101...
Over the years I have spent hundreds of hours working with clients to decide on what to do with legacy data. This is always a touch subject with client's because if you don't convert it all they feel this level of uneasiness. If they don't have all of their data in the "new" CAD format they feel they may never get it. The problem with just converting all of your legacy data to a new CAD format is this. Do you really need it all immediately? No, not typically. Most client's will typically only use quite a bit of data from the past couple of years, and a large amount less than that with data that is over a couple of years old. This is great because legacy conversion can be costly to do it all at once and there is no real return on doing it at once. For example what I would do is maybe convert the last few jobs or what I think will be used in the next few months right away. Then I would typically convert the rest on an "As Needed" basis. If I have a project coming up that uses something from 10 years ago I would either convert it myself depending on resources and scheduling or I would pay a one time much smaller fee to have some other company that specializes in this type of work convert it for me. There are many options when it comes to legacy conversion for 3D software but when it comes to AutoCAD -->> to AutoCAD Electrical the easiest way often times is to re-draw. A lot of client's think this is going to be very time consuming and to be honest it isn't the quickest thing to do, but there are tools in the software to assist or as I mentioned you could have it outsourced. There are plenty of companies that can help with this type of work. A lot of my client's are starting to work this way and realize the benefits of outsourcing this type of repetitive work while spending their time on the real design work that is hard to outsource. I hope this helps and would love to talk about this more in a future post if anyone is interested.
Until Next Time