ShareVis has recently made some significant and exciting changes in their licensing model.  Up to this point, ShareVis’ licensing model was very basic; organizations deploying ShareVis purchased one enterprise license per SharePoint Web Front End.  ShareVis now has licensing based on a rental model and based on a usage model.  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not uncommon for large organizations to have embraced virtualization, both in the testing environment and for production use.  Many vendors have offerings that make it easier for smaller organizations, or individuals, to take advantage of virtualization too.  In fact, all the major vendors offer free or personal versions of their flagship products.  And you know a software technology has gone mainstream when both Microsoft (with Hyper-V) and Oracle (with VirtualBox) have offerings in the space. Read the rest of this entry »

A common problem many companies face is the ability to have deliverable documents, like web images, catalogs, and technical illustrations, mirror their final product.  Because of the dynamic nature of design and engineering, it is often a struggle to keep this downstream output up-to-date without utilizing some type of automation. Using 3DVIA Sync ensures changes that have been made in the upstream CAD systems are reflected in the downstream content created in 3DVIA Composer.  Read the rest of this entry »

Aras Innovator has an underlying mark-up language it uses for all of its database transactions. The language is referred to as Aras Mark-up Language, or AML. Aras also provides a sandbox interface for developing and running AML, called NASH. Here’s a short primer for getting familiar with AML and NASH.  Read the rest of this entry »

With every upgrade to ENOVIA SmarTeam (not to mention upgrades to CAD, Office and database platforms) there’s no question about the benefits of building a test environment for validation prior to a production roll-out.  An important piece of building a test environment is a properly configured test vault.  Quite often, a successful test doesn’t require a complete copy of the entire production vault, so let’s take a look at a simple process to copy specific files from a production system to a test environment on demand.  Read the rest of this entry »

The purpose of Design Automation (DA) is to more quickly and easily generate the vast amount of outputs that are derived from design data like drawings, models, quotes, proposals, calculation sheets, etc. Of course, it should all be managed; preferably in a Product Data Management (PDM) system. However you choose to manage your data, whether with SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, ENOVIA SmarTeam, SolidWorks Workgroup PDM, or Skippy the Intern, you need a plan. And you need your Design Automation implementation to be designed with PDM in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

So the plan is to use ShareVis for a while, review the audit trails of your processes and make some improvements.  You’ll continue these steps for the foreseeable future in an effort to continually improve your processes.  But how will you collect your process audit trails?  Once a process is complete, ShareVis displays a complete, very verbose history on the screen.  However, you need this data in more of a database or spreadsheet format in order to glean meaning from the raw data.  Read the rest of this entry »