Welcome to this week's edition of the POB eNews...
Last week, Autodesk concurrently announced the launch of AutoCAD Civil and the discontinuation of AutoCAD Land Desktop after its final 2009 release.
"As technology has advanced and the challenges facing engineering organizations have become increasingly complex, customers have asked us to look beyond Land Desktop to technology to better address the demands of today's projects," said Adam Strafaci, senior manager, civil engineering product marketing for Autodesk. "As a result, AutoCAD Land Desktop 2009 will be the last release of Land Desktop, and moving forward, we will be focusing our resources on the development [of] AutoCAD Civil and Civil 3D.
"We plan to continue to invest in resources that make the migration from Land Desktop to AutoCAD Civil and Civil 3D as smooth as possible for our customers, and we will continue to support the product for a period of time to ease migration."
To find out how this decision may impact land surveyors, POB asked columnist Harry Ward to comment.
"The impact of this action will likely have little impact on surveyors for two reasons," Ward said. "First, Land Desktop is being replaced by the now four-year-old AutoCAD Civil 3D and its new counterpart AutoCAD Civil.
"However, if the surveyor was using Land Desktop for its survey solution, except for the addition of dynamic objects, Civil 3D offers essentially the same functionality as was found in Land Desktop, including the traverse adjustment and data collector coding and reduction tools.
"A second reason-and maybe more important reason-why surveyors won't be drastically affected by this is that many have migrated over the years to other survey solutions on the market."
What is your take? Will this transition be seamless for you? And which survey solution will you be turning to? E-mail your comments to lyonsw@bnpmedia.com.
- Wendy Lyons, Editor
Congratulations to George Dale, of Gillette, Wyo., and his 10-year-old daughter, Laura, whose beautiful Father's Day drawing will be featured in August's Fun & Games page.
This month, we want to know how hard you think the national licensure exams are. Take a moment to vote in our Quick Poll at www.pobonline.com. | 
