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Why should you care about securing your designs?

Today's businesses rely on collaboration. Designers, departments, contractors, or even whole companies collaborate and exchange information.

Given the ease with which the Internet or even just removable data storage allows people to send and receive digital data, people tend to forget about the risks associated in exchanging files such as drawings or designs.

While many companies nowadays secure their in-house file storage and restrict access to digital designs, these measures can only help as long as the drawing is not copied to a CD or email and sent out of the office. Once you give your design in electronic form to somebody else, you completely lose control over the file.

Electronic files can be copied and modified at will. Everyone who gets access to your design file may:

• remove or replace your title block to pretend the design was theirs;
• copy parts of your design into their own files, stealing your ideas; or
• modify your design, resulting in errors for which you might become liable.

People have tried to reduce these risks by converting drawing files into lesser useful formats such as HP/GL, EPS, PDF, or DWF. All these conversions have various drawbacks, though. On one hand the result isn't really secure, as it is easily possible to convert from these formats back into native drawing files. On the other hand the results are less useful, as it is no longer possible for a recipient to add their comments or drawing elements and return them to you for further design tasks.

Here CADVault® for AutoCAD comes into play. CADVault is the only software which protects AutoCAD drawing files in that recipients will not be able to change or even see your valuable contents while concurrently continues to work with DWG files to which recipients may add their own digital data.

Example

This is how the drawing looks to me:

This is how the drawing looks to you:

This is how you work with my drawing:

This is how the returned drawing with your added elements looks on my screen:

This is all done using the exact same drawing file. In this case, you weren't allowed to see what I didn't want you to see. I could have chosen to let you see everything, but only modify certain things.