Again, ACA 2011 and AMEP 2011 missing menus and toolbars

I made a post last year about the menus and toolbars missing in ACA and AMEP.

Again, Autodesk has done the same to the 2011 versions of these products. While it doesn't bother me that they are trying to get people to use the ribbon, it bothers a lot of the customers I work with. I am fine with using the ribbon even though many users are not. The official response from Autodesk support is that they have not built menus and toolbars yet for 2011. Then they said, the ones for 2010 still work, here they are, but you have to manually perform the process to add them to your CUI. While I know how to do that, I am guessing a large number of customers I work with will not be happy with this.

Is it just me or am I crazy to think Autodesk should continue to supply current CUI files containing menu's and toolbars? I'd love to see some comments on this.

Missing menu files for AutoCAD Architecture and MEP?

For those that still use AutoCAD Architecture (ACA) or AutoCAD MEP (AMEP) - you will find this of great interest. I suppose its about time I tracked this issue down. Back when I installed ACA earlier this year, I noticed there were no pulldown menu's. It didn't bother me much as I was so focused on assimilating the new ribbon. One of our customers finally came across the same issue which forced me to track it down.

After trying a reinstall of the product, looking in the Doc&Settings UserDataCache folder, and reloading CUI files to rebuild them, verifying I had the latest product version, nothing worked. I went on a week and a half long quest with Autodesk support. They told me to try all the things I had already done and then some, but none of their suggestions addressed the fact that the menus were completely missing from the CUI file. In the process of this quest, I also noticed there were no toolbars in the default ACA CUI file.

I asked Autodesk to send me their default ACA CUI file so I could try and load the menus from theirs. It too was blank as was another CUI file I got from a colleague 10 states away that worked at a different company altogether. When I posted this info back to Autodesk support I was getting rather unsettled to put it mildly.

Today they finally sent me a zip file containing all menus and toolbars that I was looking for along with instructions on how to integrate them with ACA. This left me with several questions unanswered that I'm sure you are thinking as well. Why were these not included by default with ACA 2010? Why did they not release a product update to fix this? Why did they assume we would not want these toolbars and menus in 2010? Why did it take a week and a half for them to figure out they needed to send me these files? Oh well - at least I have them now. If you are running ACA or AMEP 2010 you will likely need these files at some point. Rather than re-host them somewhere else, I found they are already posted to AUGI.

Download from this AUGI post