In 1993, PostalCAD 12 was released to U.S. Postal Service field
users to aid in performing facility layouts and equipment designs. PostalCAD 12 was an add-on to the AutoCAD
12 software, and was an excellent layout and design software for
the computer systems available at the time. In
1997 Autodesk released AutoCAD 14, which was their first “true
Windows” environment. Upon careful
consideration, Systems/Process Integration decided to port PostalCAD 12
into an enhanced tool called PostalCAD 14.
PostalCAD 14 required as a minimum AutoCAD 14 to run. It was recommended to the field to purchase MAP
3.0, an Autodesk mapping tool, which included AutoCAD 14. The Autodesk
mapping tool is more robust and allows for newer, more powerful tools to be offered to the
field.
In the summer
of 1999, Autodesk introduced AutoCAD 2000 and MAP 2000. These products were the result of user groups
across the country providing valuable input to the AutoCAD 14 products. In September of 1999 Systems/Process Integration
and other AutoCAD power users were trained on MAP 2000. It was immediately realized that PostalCAD must move to the AutoCAD 2000 / MAP 2000 environment
to be more efficient, more user friendly, and more powerful.
In the fall of 2001 PostalCAD 2002
was released and featured many new applications and enhancements. The PostalCAD
2002 release took advantage of the new AutoCAD Map 2000i development
environment and included updated interfaces and functionality. Although most features in PostalCAD
2002 would run with AutoCAD 2000 and higher releases, the new Transport Work utilities
worked only with AutoCAD Map.
It was strongly
recommended that users upgrade or convert their existing installations to AutoCAD Map 2002 to use these new features and
prepare for future releases of PostalCAD that will rely more heavily on the AutoCAD
Map instruction set.
Click to view a detailed
summary of PostalCAD 2002 Features in PDF format.
PostalCAD 2004 was released in the
fall of 2003 adding additional tools and utilities to enhance the robust
features already existing in PostalCAD 2002. The new and existing
commands were all formatted to work with AutoCAD 2004 based products.
The Library Manager was expanded to give more information about the files
that were being looked at. Two new utilities were added to help with
file management and uploading files to the Buzzsaw file repository. A
utility was also added to modify and save the existing MOD listing
associated to individual installations of PostalCAD. Many other
smaller interface solutions were implemented.
Click to view a detailed
summary of PostalCAD 2004 Features in PDF format.
In the fall of 2003, and into the
summer of 2004 a large amount of training for Postal employees who work or
would be working with PostalCAD was accomplished. A new PostalCAD
Facility Analysis course, offered through Systems Process Integration and
taught by Neosys Corporation, got a large quantity of PostalCAD users up to
date training in PostalCAD 2004 fundamentals and many of it's advanced
features. The course allowed all the participants to work on their
existing workroom floor layouts, and update them to the existing PostalCAD
standards. This large training congregation was the basis for new
utilities and changes for PostalCAD 2005.
PostalCAD 2005 improves upon the
PostalCAD platform with an entirely revamped block library structure and
naming convention. The Library Manager dialogue box now conforms to
the longer AS504 block names. Several utilities were added to enhance
the cleanup of facility layouts with existing, older block definitions.
The space management areas were enhanced and updated with new layers, and
utilities that better reflect the diversity of workroom layouts throughout
the Postal system. Many existing PostalCAD commands were updated to
look and act more like the AutoCAD interface than before. The Buzzsaw
upload utility dialogue box was re-designed to be more useful to users for
entering file names and knowing if the file had been uploaded correctly in
the right directory.
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