Archive for September, 2010

Gotcha with Oracle 11g for SmarTeam

For those of you planning to move to Oracle 11g with SmarTeam V5R20, watch out for this one.  With 11g, Oracle has introduced a feature called Deferred Segment Creation.  Generally speaking, this is a nice feature because it saves space in exports and eliminates unneeded storage allocation in many databases.  It can create problems with ENOVIA SmarTeam, however.  Continue Reading

CATIA V5 UUID Uniqueness

Given that UUID stands for Universal Unique Identifier, it may seem strange to talk about uniqueness in this context.  But it comes up more often than users might like inside of CATIA V5.  It isn’t simple to determine the UUID of a CATIA V5 file, nor is it easy to manipulate the value.  With a little bit of information though, it isn’t too hard to avoid some basic CATIA V5 UUID problems.  Continue Reading

SolidWorks EPDM 2011 Launched

For avid SolidWorks users, this certainly isn’t the first announcement related to the launch of SolidWorks 2011.  But as you might expect, this article is more focused on the latest release of Enterprise PDM than on the release of SolidWorks itself.  It appears that EPDM 2011 will be another solid release of SolidWorks’ flagship PDM solution, and that there are a handful of very interesting new capabilities.  Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Free XML Editor

XML is the wonder of the modern programming age. Its plain text can represent objects with properties and attributes to capture complex structures in a simple text file. And it’s even fairly easy to understand. Just look at it. It’s logical. But as logical as XML is, when you look at an XML file in production, it’s huge, convoluted, and impossible to grasp in one glimpse inside of Notepad.  Lucky for us, our friends at Microsoft have come up with an answer in their free XML Notepad 2007 tool.  Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Free XML Editor

XML is the wonder of the modern programming age. Its plain text can represent objects with properties and attributes to capture complex structures in a simple text file. And it’s even fairly easy to understand. Just look at it. It’s logical. But as logical as XML is, when you look at an XML file in production, it’s huge, convoluted, and impossible to grasp in one glimpse inside of Notepad.  Lucky for us, our friends at Microsoft have come up with an answer in their free XML Notepad 2007 tool.  Continue Reading

SharePoint for PLM Solution Announced

Razorleaf today announces the introduction of an open source SharePoint-based solution developed in collaboration with Actify, Aras, and Microsoft.  The solution enables product data assets normally contained within a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) or Product Data Management (PDM) system to be shared throughout the enterprise, as well as with its customers, suppliers, and partners globally, improving collaboration and cycle times by fostering speed to decision – visually.  Continue Reading

Rule Efficiency in Design Automation

One of the biggest complaints about design automation is performance. Companies are outraged that the tool runs for a whole hour to complete a process that used to take four to six weeks. Despite the obvious lack of perspective here, it is a design automation best practice to consider performance and optimize rules wherever possible. Several sources of performance degradation can be avoided with a little foresight.  Continue Reading