The Boston Harbor project, being carried out under a 1986 federal court order, is the central element of the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority's effort to upgrade the aging sewage treatment system and end Boston Harbor pollution. When completed at the end of the century, the project will ensure that wastewater discharges from 43 communities in the greater Boston area meet all state and federal standards for protecting public health and the marine environment.

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) uses a wide variety of information systems. Docupoint, an Autodesk Developer Network partner, provides a web based drawing management system for the almost completed Deer Island Wastewater Treatment plant. Powered by Autodesk core technologies including RealDWG and the DWF Toolkit, DrawingSearcher software provides content search and automatic web publishing for the plant's 20,000 AutoCAD engineering drawings.

With DrawingSearcher, anyone within the facility can use a web browser and simple keyword search to find, view and print AutoCAD drawings. Docupoint DrawingSearcher provides the unique capability to search for drawings by text or number strings contained inside the drawings. Plant operators can now quickly located the drawings they need by a simple word search on an equipment description or number.

The Deer Island plant is a part of the $3.4 billion Boston Harbor Project (BHP), one of the largest and most complex wastewater treatment projects ever completed. More then 20 design engineering teams were involved in completing the project drawings. When design packages were completed, the electronic drawing files were turned over to the plant for use in on-going operations and maintenance. Docupoint DrawingSearcher eliminated the use of a document management system. Traditional document management systems require a time consuming and error prone manual cataloging of all the drawings into the system.

DrawingSearcher automatically indexes the drawing files by reading the file contents, extracts the word list to a full text search engine. and creates PNG preview images and DWF files for on-line viewing with Autodesk Design Review. As new drawing sets are received and added to the system the DrawingSearcher index index is automatically updated. Docupoint DrawingSearcher is saving the MWRA hundreds of man-hours by eliminating the need to manually catalog each engineering drawing. Here's what Pat Cafferty, Program Manager Technical Information DITP, has to say about Docupoint DrawingSearcher.

DrawingSearcher makes it easy for MWRA personnel to find specific AutoCAD drawings. It also eliminated the need to utilize specialized document management software.