CAD/GIS Crystal Ball

It appears that ESRI is looking into closer integration with AutoCAD, but this seems to be a ways off. Here's a summary of some recent blogs:

Don Kuehne, a technical product manager for CAD interoperability at ESRI apparently writes a blog entry in GIS CAD Interoperability, describing a new AutoCAD integration product for ArcGIS.

James Fee reports this in his blog, with the following quote from Don Kuehne's post (This is a quote from Fee, who is quoting Kuehne):

ArcGIS for AutoCAD is a no-cost ESRI application that works on top of AutoCAD 2007 and gives me the ability to add one or more ESRI map service view(s) to my AutoCAD drafting environment. With this new ESRI technology I have direct access to every GIS data format without conversion and without translation inside AutoCAD. I as an AutoCAD user see what the GIS professional sees; finished high quality cartographic representations of complex GIS data structures thay may be stored in a wide variety raster, network, image and vector formats.

The original Kuehne blog entry is then removed, for unknown reasons, and Fee notes this.

Then, All Points blogged that at the ESRI Federal User Conference a demo of the "ArcGIS for AutoCAD" product was made. All Points apparently then talked to someone at ESRI about it:

I learned that all that was happening in the demo [at the ESRI Federal User Conference] was that a bitmap (raster) of the data was put into AutoCAD as a "backdrop" to the CAD entities; no AutoCAD entities were created, thus they couldn't be edited. But, he noted, you could do an "identify" and get back attributes from the server. That's based not on clicking on an entity, but passing the location of interest back to the server.

How I read these two quotes is that ESRI has come up with an AutoCAD plug-in that will allow AutoCAD to read ArcIMS & ArcServer image services - all very-very preliminary. Sounds interesting, and I'm sure we'll hear more about it.