3DMojo

So, now that Acrobat 3D has shipped and everyone is thinking about how they might use it, let's separate the obvious uses from the not-as-clear applications.

It's clear that Acrobat 3D offers great file translation capabilities. But we've consistently argued that this is, essentially, a utility function. As such, it's not a strategic application. The addition of a new utility to the utility drawer, like the choice between WinRAR and WinZip, is always a good thing.

But file utilities are not the basis of entererprise collaboration infrastructures. Thinking about PDF (3D or not) as the ultimate collaboration unit-of-work misses the basic requirement for improving the use of 3D information throughout the enterprise: the ability to add value to that 3D design data.

I'm not talking about simple comments or markup. Real value comes from content creation. Adobe likes to demo post-it notes on 3D models. It's cute, and we've all used features like this, but it's not the same thing as adding a BOM to an assembly or being able to animate how a special tool is used to take the product apart.

In short, Acrobat 3D doesn't create any content. The next questions, of course, are how do non-engineering users create content? And how do they want to interact with digital product definitions?

The overwhelming answer is that people use Microsoft Office for non-product design content creation. The secret sauce of collaboration for CAD and PLM users is simple: give them a way to combine Office content and product content. Whether or not PDF is used to store and transmit that information is only a question of cosmetics, like whether the inter-office envelopes are brown or white.

Rodney Bowen-Wright blogged about this very topic in a post he wrote about Seemage last month. Rodney said:

Seemage figured that most people in enterprises "live" in Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint®, and Microsoft Office Excel®. WIth 300 million+ office users worldwide, most enterprise workers have their messaging and collaboration needs delivered by Microsoft Office Outlook® and Office SharePoint Server 2007.Their bet is that most users want to access core product information from their current applications. They decided to tightly integrate their product around Sharepoint and Office...

Rodney is exactly correct that we think the real promise of PLM and CAD systems in in making sure that desktop Office users have the ability to combine design content with Office content creation. Send it around as a PDF if you like. But at the end of the day, it's not the carrier you care about, it's the content.

We are very pleased to announce the worldwide release of Seemage 4.2. The press release we issued today, linked to this post as a PDF, details the exciting new features available in Seemage 4.2.

We also invite you to a webinar featuring Seemage 4.2 which we are holding on Thursday, June 21 at 14:00 EDT, 11:00 PDT, 18:00 GMT. Click here to register.

And, if you want to try Seemage 4.2, just click the icon below to go to our download page.

 Seemage Releases Seemage 4.2: Download (648)

We're back fresh from a long Memorial Day holiday weekend and rarin' to take on another controversial topic: ISO standards versus open source.

I'll bet a lot of people have never considered the difference between the two and assign very similar benefits to being an ISO standard as being open or open source. But there's a world of difference. And CAD and PLM users, in particular, should pay attention to the very different qualities of the two classifications. In particular, CAD and PLM users should make sure not to assume that an ISO standard gives them the opportunities or protections that real open source products offer.

Recently, we attended a competitive vendor's presentation which made a big deal of the fact that they'd submitted their proprietary file format definition to the ISO. The not-very-subtle implication was that by having an ISO standard, this file format (which is already in use on tens of millions of consumer computers), was "open."

Uh....not so fast. In a nutshell, ISO ain't open source. Far from it. The ISO is a super-bureaucracy of bureaucracies. Don't think for a minute that these standards-setting committees are like the open source projects which actually publish source code and buglists and interface specifications.

In many ways, ISO standards are the opposite. It's can be naked attempt to have a possibly proprietary standard adopted for worldwide use. There's nothing wrong with standards, of course. Standards are a good thing.

But the difference between a committee-adopted standard and true open source can be subtle. And extension of currently open file formats that are submitted to the ISO doesn't mean that the specifications and future of that extended file format are really in the hands of users. For example, ask yourself if you could access the file data via XML or other open APIs? (I apologize for the naked promotion of Seemage in what is otherwise meant to be a serious discussion of the confusion between ISO standards and open.)

Open is about decentralized control and visibility. Standards are not necessarily the same thing. The nasty surprise is that an ISO standard can mean the imposition of a proprietary format on your PLM and CAD systems. Imagine the look on your face when that comes back to bite you.

To answer my own question: everyone else with whom we compete. This radar chart documents the results of our internal tests of the new Seemage 4.0 against our major competitors on 36 different functional areas. In short, it's a rout.

It would be easy to be cynical and dismiss these results as pure propaganda, the results of rigged tests or biased assumptions.

But it just ain't so. Quite the opposite in fact. The tests were done as a way to ensure that the newest release of Seemage remains competitive and maintains its lead. It might be hard to believe at first, but our guys were actually looking for issues in performance or functionality compared to the competition.

Why even show this on our blog? We believe these results make it clear that the architectural foundation of Seemage -- it's XML-based system for managing product information -- delivers performance and usability capabilities that matter in the real world of users who aren't necessarily CAD experts. Claiming "ease of use" has to be backed up by both architectural and implementation excellence. What better way to verify that than by testing against the competition?

(And no, I don't intend to name the competitors. I suspect Chris will not be all that happy I put the summary chart up on the blog to begin with. For me, this is one of those "ask for forgiveness, not permission" opportunities.)

Allow me to detour for a moment from our usual fare of Seemage-focused commentary to lend the support and encouragement of all of us at Seemage and 3DMojo for our fellow blogger Franco Folini.

In a recent post, Franco details how his efforts to engage in open, direct communication with a blogger at Adobe was met with corporate stonewalling.

Reading Franco's post reminded me of the most important lesson companies need to learn when they start reaching out to online communities: be authentic. If you want to give your point of view, you have to take the commentary of the community. And rule one: the community will tell you lots of things you might not want to hear.

As Franco points out, there's a tradition of allowing voices to be heard. Stepping on that tradition destroys any claim of authenticity. In Adobe's case, they're trying to muscle their way into the CAD world. Ignoring people in that community won't help. The CAD world just ain't that big. Needlessly pissing off people who have influence, like Franco, is a huge and long-term mistake.

Adobe has done to Franco the very thing that makes customers feel like companies are monolithic and unapproachable. For its part, Adobe is probably busy dismissing the online CAD community as insignificant or irrelevant. (How wrong they are!)

I am not suggesting that a company has to permit spam or inappropriate commentary. But if you just don't like what you're hearing from people, you ignore it at your own peril. On this blog, for example, we do require people to register to post commentary. And we put all incoming trackbacks into a queue to separate out the spam. But we have a strict policy of publishing all valid commentary, even when we disagree.

Sure, 3DMojo.com is about Seemage, and our vision for revolutionizing the way CAD and PLM are used in manufacturers. People who come here know they're gonna get a dose of propaganda. But still they come, because they are interested in what we have to say and they know we "get" the blogosphere. And we aren't trying to control it.

It looks like Adobe is so tone-deaf it thinks it can.