Google Drive manages folders and syncs those folders across devices, making them shareable. Then there’s echo by DCM. Echo manages engineering drawings, preventing disorganized chaos with intuitive user controls, a powerful visual browser, a modular (by site, by floor, by discipline) search wizard, and a central command hub that supercharges what a Facility Manager can do. Oh, and it also syncs across devices making them shareable.
echo vs Google Drive: a rocket to firecracker comparison
No doubt about it, Google offers a powerful suite of business tools under its flagship product, GSuite. For a tidy $25/month/user, Google Drive gives companies a spot in the Cloud to store corporate documents in standard folders and sync those files across work desktops, home laptops, and smartphones. Google’s got the “everyday task” market in the bag; it gives companies a way to organize documents, photos, spreadsheets, and slide decks in a secure, searchable way.
That’s all lovely and well, but there are a few major problems with Google Drive that make it a bad choice for your engineering drawings:
- Lacklustre search functionality
- Limited visual display
- Something we call modification freedom.
What’s modification freedom? It’s the way Google lets end-users play with folder hierarchies (how folders are structured).
That’s where things get messy.
It’s about preventing mess
The lifecycle of an engineering drawing spans decades. Keeping track of the right version over many years from many sources depends on preventing duplicates. Up-to-the-second real-time access only works if you pull the right version of a drawing and manage user access to it.
Google Drive would let Jim store drawings the way he liked (by facility) before he retired as Facility Manager in 2012. But Jim didn’t organize drawings the same way Betty did in 2018 (by discipline). And Betty doesn’t organize drawings the same way Kumar will in 2025 (alphabetically).
That kind of freewheeling user-preference permission causes the same sort of chaos that paper blueprints did in damp basements in 1967—which is exactly what Google Drive facilitates without any red flags. In fact, Google Drive builds duplicate functionality into the right-click menu that encourages multiple versions (then invites you to scroll down forever through version history to figure things out).
So even if your team agrees on a file folder structure within Google Drive, and nails down a best practices policy, and even if every single team member sticks to that structure… how do you know for sure that the drawing you need is the right one?
Google Drive stores and shares files. That’s it. It’s not a program that cares if someone duplicates a file then stores that copy two hierarchies down. And it has no idea if the drawing named Final_Version_2017_b is the working drawing that helps turn off the broken water main in the southwest zone of building #4 at the Idaho plant. Maybe the right drawing was actually Final_v2_2018 that didn’t even make it into Google Drive because Helen is a hoarder and she put that drawing on her desktop in a folder called “Make myself invaluable.”
You’re no further ahead with Google Drive than you were in that damp drawing room overloaded with musty-smelling blueprints.
Thankfully, there’s echo, by DCM.
Echo is an engineering drawing library that won’t let you create chaos and brings up the right document every single time.
Why is echo way better than Google Drive, exactly?
Because of the way echo restricts and permits control to guarantee accuracy.
Because of how echo displays your drawing in a dashboard.
Because of how echo helps you find what you need—fast.
Better control over your drawings and better visual display
The view options in Google Drive are “list” and “grid.” That’s it. It’s easy to preview a file, but that preview is isolated. It doesn’t appear as part of a control hub. Preview with Google Drive is simply a zoom command. There’s also the problem with opening a drawing in Google Drive. Depending on the format of the drawing, clicking on it will jump you to an outside app. That means you may need to open a PDF viewer, or image software like Photoshop or Illustrator, or CAD programs like AutoCAD. Your drawings will live in multiple places. Multiple places mean multiple opportunities for hassle and, worse, for errors.
Echo, on the other hand, controls the information you see in one spot within a user-friendly visual browser. Your drawings appear as large thumbnails in rows allowing you to swipe left or right to visually browse your most popular drawings, recent drawings, and drawings in the categories you set up.
Buttons and options that border the drawing let you do any number of things, like request a CAD file or add a revision or share a drawing. From one mobile responsive intuitive interface, you can easily send an electrician a schematic of the 2019 renovation of the third floor of Building D in Michigan while you’re, say, out on a date (while your date chats about your reservation with the maître d’). Secret send! … and done.
“The online echo system that holds our drawings is easily searchable and readily usable by all the facilities staff in the Board. The support we continue to receive is excellent and we would highly recommend echo and support to other school Boards.”
—Lewis Morgulis from Durham Catholic District School Board
User permissions and the green checkmark—to keep things organized.
Echo is a gatekeeper. It stops chaos and supercharges accuracy. It grants different access permissions to different users. It restricts access to one user at a time. It makes sure real-time updates are saved and not overwritten by two people looking at the same drawing. Echo prevents duplicates, flags problems, and identifies the right drawing with a satisfying green checkmark.
That green checkmark gives you peace of mind. Simple but powerful, when you see the green checkmark on your drawing, you know you’re looking at the most up-to-date accurate version available. In fact, echo flags old drawings that are outdated. Google Drive doesn’t do that. And since your facility runs on the accuracy of your drawings, Google Drive doesn’t make the grade.
Search Wizard—site-level and modular
The power of echo lies in its friendly user interface, its safeguards, and the way it helps you find what you’re looking for. Just like Google, you can search by keyword. But if that doesn’t work (because if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you probably don’t have the right keyword), you can tap into echo’s advanced search wizard functionality.
Start by selecting the site—echo is location-based and handles multiple sites like buttah. Select your site in a single click. (In Google Drive, navigating to another site would mean clicking into a separate parent folder and drilling down through the folder hierarchies again—bummer.)
Then scroll through custom modules. Drill down by floor. Do you think the drawing you need is for the basement? Click basement. Now select the appropriate discipline. Do you need an architectural drawing or a mechanical drawing? Mechanical. Okay, click that. Is the drawing related to HVAC, plumbing, piping, or safety systems? HVAC it is. All relevant HVAC drawings for the basement of that building appear.
There it is! Click to view that drawing—because that’s when the magic happens.
Powerful dashboard—custom views for engineering drawings
Unlike Google Drive that provides a preview button (that greys everything else out), echo displays your drawing in a screen-sized preview with tools available around your drawing. What kind of tools?
- Verify it’s the right drawing with the green checkmark.
- Review drawing data (available formats and revision history)
- Request a CAD file
- Zoom in to high-resolution detail
- Add a comment
- Star the drawing as a favourite
- Download the drawing
- Share the drawing
- Create a report
Live support (from friendly folks)
Echo comes with amazing support and guidance. We aren’t a multi-billion dollar conglomerate like Google. Nope. We’re a North American firm built entirely around engineering drawing management. We’ve processed millions of drawings over the last XX years, which is long enough to know where the shortfalls exist in the world of drawing management. We filled one of those gaps with an online app that quickly became the most important tool in Facility Manager’s toolkits across North America, Europe, and now Australia.
“Best in the business! I have been in FM management for 25 years and DCM gets it from a practical operational perspective because they listen to their clients.“
—Timothy Mackey from BGIS
Shameless plug
As leaders in the Drawing Management industry, DCM created echo engineering drawing management software to put all the things you need to do at your fingertips and prevent chaotic duplicates and unnecessary versions. You use echo to make sure you can’t do the things an ordinary storage drive lets you do. You use echo when you have hundreds or thousands—or millions—of large-format engineering drawings that call for a level of user-functionality that doesn’t exist in Google Drive.
With echo, everything is visual, organized, secure, and searchable—from anywhere at any time on any device.
You’re investing in tailor-made, drawing-specific functionality over and above a basic cookie-cutter file manager. You’re investing in accuracy delivered when you need it.
Combine this functionality with DCM’s hands-on support and you have the most optimized digital library available today that gives you swipeable search-and-share functionality—and a backup crew when you need them.
DCM leads the way in all major industries including: healthcare, education, engineering, manufacturing, utilities, recreational, government, insurance and more. And our powerful cloud-based echo drawing library makes managing digital drawings faster and easier. Access the information you need the moment you need it.
