There have been several threads on this board about providing digital information to others. I thought that people here might be interested in seeing the comments from the other side.
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D/Civil-3D-2011-WHERE-DO-WE-START/td-p/3025970
One thing that I like to do when sending CAD files over is to include layers with triangulation entities (3D faces and 3D lines) of the the terrain model, inclusion/exclusion boundaries as well as the contour data, and the point data.
Then anyone can use the information, whether they are using 2012 or R12 or pretty much anything else on the market. Basic stuff, 3D entities. Often times, the basic stuff is all that a user need to get going and keep moving.
:beer:
Interesting comments there. One engineer asks why anyone would use a survey firm that doesn't work in CAD, unless they are "charging rates from 30 years ago". It would be nice if such things were considers (and I do occasionally see contracts that require CAD deliverables), but too many clients just look at price and go with the lowest bidder.
Of course, in this case, all the client has done is pass part of the work from the surveyor to the engineer. It's quite likely that what the client may have saved with the survey gets eaten up (and then some) when the engineer has to recreate the surveyor's work in CAD.