PLM tagged posts

Visit us at Digital Factory at Hannover Messe, Hall 17.0, Booth C40 from April 20-24, 2009!

We invite you to visit us at Hannover Messe. Take a look at 3DVIA Composer – “the revolution for product documentation.” Meet our partners from Dassault Systèmes and SolidWorks and see how 3DVIA Composer can help you deliver user manuals, work instructions, product information, and service and training materials directly from your 3D CAD data – and always keep it up-to-date.

Talk with our specialists from our Business Partners and receive first-hand information about all the advantages of our Dassault Systèmes PLM and SolidWorks solutions. During the fair we are available for all your questions from 9:00am to 6:00pm every day!

3DVIA – this is “3D for All...

BFM : Les sagas du pouvoir 2008

Le rendez-vous incontournable des acteurs de l’économie et de la politique. L’émission propose des interviews sans concession d’hommes et de femmes qui font la Une de l’actualité. Écouter les Sagas du Pouvoir, c’est aussi prendre le temps de dialoguer avec des invités qu’ils soient hommes politiques, ou grands patrons.

Voici l’enregistrement de l’émission avec Bernard Charlès.

Here is yet another in-depth demonstration of a 3DVIA Composer integration to ENOVIA SmarTeam. This time you will see 3DVIA Sync Integration, 3DVIA Composer, CATIA, and ENOVIA SmarTeam all comimg together to create a very robust environment for creating, managing, and updating 3D animated content.

The example will show how SmarTeam meta data can be integrated into the 3DVIA Composer content, how the 3DVIA Composer file can be managed and updated by SmarTeam, and how CATIA modifications to the product structure can be automatically propagated into 3DVIA Composer.

Thanks again to Evgeniy Fedotov for the great sample integration and video.

 

Back in Episode #64, you saw a great example of the power of 3DVIA Sync Integration and the ease and speed by which a SmarTeam integration can be built.

This podcast shows another example of integrating 3DVIA Composer into ENOVIA SmarTeam, in particular the ability to update Composer data with meta data modifications. The combination of Composer’s XML structure, associative labels that reflect current meta data values, and the ability to tie it all together into SmarTeam provides exceptionally robust capabilities for just about any customer-specific integration requirement.

I am pleased to announce that 3DVIA Composer can be seen at the upcoming ENOVIA Customer Conference Europe (ECC Europe), June 3-4 in the Hilton Munich Park, Germany.

Please be sure to stop by the 3DVIA booth at the ENOVIA Customer Conference Europe. Also, on Wednesday, June 4 @ 10:30 pm, stop by the Enterprise Business Process Collaboration track for a 3DVIA Composer presentation and see how you can integrate 3D into your after sales process.

 

I am pleased to announce that 3DVIA Composer can be seen at the upcoming ENOVIA Americas Customer Conference, May 6-9 in the Orlando World Center Marriott.

Please be sure to stop buy the Dassault Systèmes booth at the ENOVIA Americas Customer Conference. Also, on Tuesday, May 6 @ 2:30 pm, stop by the Solutions Theater for a 3DVIA Composer presentation.

We are often asked about whether 3DVIA Composer can be integrated into a PDM or PLM system. The answer, of course, is a resounding “yes”. With the power of 3DVIA Sync Integration and our open XML architecture, our customers have been able to create very robust integrations to their business systems such as Agile, SmarTeam, ENOVIA VPM, and many others. And the best part is that they were able to complete those integrations very quickly.

Jonathan RIONDET was in Dassault Systèmes Russia last week and had the chance to meet Evgeniy FEDOTOV, one of the application engineers for ENOVIA SmarTeam. To prove how easy it is to integrate 3DVIA Composer into SmarTeam, he was able to insert our free 3DVIA Player ActiveX control into SmarTeam, to enable 3DVIA Player as the viewer for SmarTeam...

In a previous podcast, you watched Jonathan use 3DVIA Sync to automatically update his product deliverables. It is a very powerful demonstration, and I encourage you to watch it again.

This week, you will see a similar demonstration, but with a very key difference: all of the CAD conversion and publishing to 2D formats is done using 3DVIA Sync Integration. Using scripting and XML job file definitions, 3DVIA Sync Integration offers a powerful way to equip your PLM systems with the ability to automatically trigger the creation of 3DVIA Composer files and publish them into several deliverable formats.

Most importantly, with 3DVIA Sync Integration your PLM system can take engineering modifications and perform incremental updates to the 3DVIA Composer content, re-publish your deliverables, and...

It is a real pleasure to begin yet another year with a new amazing demonstration of the power of product information everyware, as implemented by 3DVIA Composer.

One of the questions I hear almost every time we talk to CATIA users is, “what about metadata?” How does 3DVIA Composer re-use this critical CAD data when I want to create compelling product documentation directly from my CATIA V5 3D CAD data?”

And it’s an important question because that metadata — data about the 3D CAD data — is critical to producing accurate assembly instructions, technical illustrations and more. If you can’t easily get the data about the data from the digital product definition into your deliverables, then a significant piece of effectively automating the documentation process would be missing.

As you can ...

This week, I am putting a new data sheet for 3DVIA Composer into the podcast feed instead of our usual video “vignette”.

I wanted to make sure everyone has an opportunity to see it, as it contains the first screenshots we have published with the 3DVIA Composer UI. Past PDFs we have put into the podcast feed have been extremely popular.

The blog and podcast will return in early 2008. Until then, everyone at 3DVIA wishes you and yours a happy holiday season.

I expect that everyone has heard of Takeru Kobayashi, a Japanese competitive eater who until 2007 had won six consecutive hot-dog eating contests.

I mention Kobayashi (even though he has been dethroned by Joey “Jaws” Chestnut in the Nathan’s contest) because the image of people just wildly stuffing their faces popped into my head as I read Mark Kiker’s post on the caddmanager.com blog about CAD training, free food and the rules for making sure the people who come to a lunch-and-learn really are going to be there to learn.

Never one to pass up a good meal for free, even when I can’t make heads or tails of the content, I kinda, sorta sympathize with Mark’s plight.

On the other hand, the real cure is simple: make sure the training is something people care about.

If I got a training invite fo...

This week, Jonathan gives us a compelling overview of 3DVIA Safe, technology that is part of 3DVIA Composer which absolutely, positively guarantees that users of 3DVIA Composer-generated data will not be able to copy it and abuse your design’s intellectual property.

Think about it for a moment: if we are really moving to an era in which 3D information becomes as commonplace as text, how are we going to secure this information? If everyone has 3D product data, how do we protect our digital product definition? After all, digital product data today is the product in many respects.

3DVIA Composer’s answer is that you do it in a way that encourages the use of the data but which makes it impossible for those uses to be diverted in ways that endanger the digital definition.

Pay special atte...

I am very pleased to be able to bring yet another video episode to you today. You may notice that while the name of the podcast has changed to reflect our new branding, the actual video was recorded by Jonathan using the product formerly known as Seemage. (Prince fans, please forgive me.) That’s because we prepare these episodes in advance of their publication. With our hectic schedules,  the podcast contributors record episodes when they can, and I select the order in which we present them. The content is so good and has been so popular that I think it’s better to share episodes recorded before we shipped 3DVIA Composer than to waste these fascinating looks at the capabilities 3DVIA Composer offers.

So, with that offered as an explanation for what you see in the menus, concen...

Today, just six short weeks after acquiring Seemage, Dassault Systèmes announced that the former Seemage product has been enhanced and rebranded as 3DVIA Composer. You can read all the exciting details in the press release included in this post.

I would also like to remind everyone that we have a new “mini” website devoted to 3DVIA Composer at http://www.3dviacomposer.com/. Also, our forums are up and running for discussion at http://forums.3dmojo.com/ and, of course, the blog posts and podcast series will continue here.

As part of this news, we have officially retired the Seemage name. So, if you see it anywhere, please let me know so we can remove it...

The November 8, 2007 edition of Machine Design magazine has a very interesting article on XML and CAD.  Leslie Gordon takes a look at the importance of XML as a data store, and more importantly, when discussing Seemage, notes the benefits of an XML-based architecture in delivering information to non-technical desktop users.

You can view the article at here. Leslie’s article begins on page 74.

So, first off I want to apologize to our regular readers and subscribers that we didn’t post a podcast episode last Friday as is our habit. We had FTP server problems. We’ll be back with some killer new episodes starting week after next (this is a holiday week in the US).

I was in France for the last two weeks working with our new colleagues to re-brand and re-package the former Seemage as 3DVIA Composer. That work has gone spectacularly. Our new name is just the beginning of what we intend to do to extend our vision of product information everyware in some fascinating ways.

In short, we have achieved escape velocity as an important part of DS’s global efforts. And customers are already taking notice.

Consider this snippet of an email thread I saw the other day:

We have been a...

Today’s podcast episode is a little different. Instead of focusing on Seemage features, we are presenting a sales success story in both French and English.

To get this breaking story, Garth Coleman interviewed Fabrice of Axemble in France via Skype, one of the EU’s largest SolidWorks resellers. As you will hear, Fabrice tells the amazing story of how an important customer was so excited about Seemage, they purchased it on the first sales call.

Now I realize some of you may think this is pure propaganda. (Though when, I ask you, was the last time a PLM company posted such an authentic, unedited story? When we said we were going to continue to using the blog to be completely open about Seemage after our acquisition, we meant it.)

But in reality, this is a story about compelling technology…t...

I am writing this post from the Agora, or exhibit floor, at the European CATIA Forum (ECF).

Those of you with whom we’ve talked since we were acquired in October by Dassault Systèmes might have heard us use a new name for Seemage: 3DVIA Composer.

I’ve waited until now to publicly announce our new name because I didn’t want to steal Bruno’s and Chris’s thunder in announcing the new name, which they did yesterday (Monday) to partners and today (Tuesday) to the world in the general session at ECF. (The very UGC-y photo above is a cell-phone photo of Bruno premiering the name for the first time in public.)

Needless to say, we’re very excited about becoming part of 3DVIA, DS’s newest brand...

This episode marks the one-year anniversary of the Seemage podcast. I want to thank everyone who has downloaded, commented on and enjoyed these. It makes preparing them a pleasure for us.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the hard work of the folks in Seemage who created the animations and product vignettes we have presented here. My deepest thanks to everyone in Sophia who contributed to this. A year-long podcast with tens of thousands of downloads ain’t nothing to sneeze at.

Today’s topic is another bravura demonstration from Jonathan showing how easy it is for non-technical users to create very sophisticated documentation, in this case, animations, by giving Seemage just the merest hint of what you want...

In this week’s episode, Jonathan manages to show two amazing things about Seemage in less than two minutes. First, there is the search function, which allows you to rapidly find anything you need in a Seemage model.

More interestingly, by showing that it’s possible to search a Seemage model for metadata without having the part’s geometry loaded, Jonathan is making clear a fundamental point about Seemage: that Seemage is a property editor.  Anything (and everything) in Seemage is simply a property. So, if you want to search for a part number, it’s not dependent on the geometry.

It takes some thinking to grasp the concept, but once you do it’s clear why Seemage is both powerful and fast.

Thanks again to Jonathan for this week’s episode.

In high tech circles, Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 book, Crossing the Chasm, is considered gospel. In it, Moore talks about the stages of technology adoption and groups users into stages based on their relative enthusiasm for new technologies. The last (and largest) group of people to receive the benefits of any new technology are the “late adopters”.

I been thinking about what I heard Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks say at DS’s industry analyst event last week. Jeff said that the opportunity to convert users from 2D is orders of magnitude larger than winning customers from competitors. (On that point, the competition is seriously left in the dust based on what I’ve seen of SolidWorks 2008).

Then, last week, I came across this very interesting article by Luke Davis from Cadalyst which is clearly tar...

This week’s episode demonstrates an important capability in Seemage: application integration. In this video, you will notice that Seemage is being used to integrate 3D data with procedural information in a custom application. The application includes the business logic required to prevent users from making errors or skipping parts of the process. Notice also in the video how the XML architecture of Seemage improves the creation of these product procedures.

This video illustrates that when we talk about content authoring in Seemage, it is not limited to production of PDFs and Word documents, or even the planet’s best product animations. It includes programmability. It’s a pretty amazing capability of Seemage, and one customers are increasingly taking advantage of.

This week’s podcast episode has three related and interesting things to see(mage).

First, Jonathan shows us how to hide parts. This is useful not only to reduce file size, but also to make it easier to work on create documentation for the specific function or part of the product desired.

Next, Jonathan shows us how to manually reduce the accuracy of the product data to secure the intellectual property contained in that digital data. While this can be useful, Seemage offers an even better way.

Jonathan demonstrates Seemage Secure3D technology to quickly and easily secure the IP while also displaying parts and assemblies correctly.

We hope you enjoy this video podcast episode and my thanks again to Jonathan Riondet for the recording.

 

This week’s episode is, as they say in the movies, a blockbuster.

Jonathan Riondet’s topic this week is deceptively simple: applying styles to Seemage content. You will be impressed with the ease and flexibility Seemage styles offer.

But then, about 2 minutes into this episode, things get very interesting: You witness the power of the XML-based architecture of Seemage as Jonathan changes the display language of the graphical image via modification of the external XML style information.

Consider the importance of this: automatic display of content in local language based, for example, on the language in use on the desktop. Being able to programmatically add languages whenever necessary. Elimination of reams of printed versions of product documentation.

This episode is an extraordina...

Last week at the PLM Road Map 2007 conference, Gordon Benson of NMHG gave a presentation on his company’s success in using product information in many different areas of their operations. Gordon has kindly consented to allowing us to post the presentation here for you to browse.

I picked the slide you see here to be the graphic image for this post because it summarizes why Seemage is in business: to help companies share and reuse this fundamental information. By the way, it also shows how manufacturers are beginning to realize and respond to the impact digital product definition data has on their operations.

Gordon presented this information in a way that draws on his many years of experience working with technology companies...