Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Autodesk University Virtual 2010

Right now I’m attending AU Virtual 2010 where the General Session keynote is running.

Here’s how we might be able to access space with the help of a microwave beam at 140 GHz.

More at Escape Dynamics

Inventor Fusion will be shipped along with AutoCAD for free. Via Deelip.com.

Factory Layout Optimization for AutoCAD is free to try via Autodesk Labs.

Factory Layout Optimization for AutoCAD Tech Preview

BIM

Autodesk TinkerBox seems like a fun game for iPad\iPhone\iPod that soon will be released.

Tinkerbox is an app that will be available for iPhone, iPod and iPad that is designed to bring engineering challenges and education to users of all ages in a 'game' like environment. There are various challenges, each one getting slightly tougher where users have to solve engineering problems like getting ball-bearings from one point to another using motors, plates, fasteners, rope, chains, conveyors etc. The intuitive interface allows you to drag and drop components from your toolbox into the working area to build a process. If you're not sure what something is or how it works, just use the interactive help to learn more about a motor for example. Via Autodesk Manufacturing Blog.

Autodesk TinkerBox

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Autodesk Product Support Severity Levels and Response Times

I found these changes that will start soon and I think it will be a good thing for both customers and Autodesk.

To better address customer issues, Autodesk will begin classifying product support requests according to severity level (standard, urgent, or critical) and will provide customers with new estimated response times based on severity level and Subscription tier (Subscription, Gold, or Platinum).  Beginning December 5, 2010, customers will need to assign severity levels to each support request they submit.

In addition, Autodesk has made improvements to self-help support to ensure that customers receive predictable, and in some cases faster, responses to all support issues.  These resources include Autodesk forums and on-line Support Knowledge Centers.

* "Business hours" are defined as the local weekly hours of operation for the assigned Autodesk product support call center, in the customer's region, excluding Autodesk holidays, weekends and other non-work days applicable to the region.

** "Extended hours" are defines as 24 hours per day, seven days per week (Monday through Sunday), 365 days per year, including after-hours periods and Autodesk holidays worldwide.

How is Severity Level Determined?

1/Critical
A catastrophic defect, such as total software failure resulting in unrecoverable data loss or interruption of crucial project.  No immediate workaround is available.

  • Product defect that completely stops all progress on a mission critical project
  • An operation crashes the software while performing an established workflow
  • An operation has corrupted project files
  • After software upgrade, a previously working feature is no longer working and is seriously impeding workflow
  • After software installation or upgrade, files can no longer be opened

2/Urgent
A problem or issue that severely impairs a major product function.  Operations can continue in a restricted fashion, but with effects on long-term productivity.

  • A specific file will not open
  • A feature will not work in one file, but works in other files
  • Certain machines crash or otherwise fail to open or run a product, but other machines function normally
  • An expected workflow cannot be used; an alternate method is available but not optimum

3/Standard
A problem or issue with limited effects on operation and productivity.  Workarounds may be available.

  • How-to questions
  • Documentation questions
  • Customer suggestions
  • Request for new product features or enhancements

Via Autodesk’s KB TS16014725

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Windows Live Writer 2011 bug and wish

If adding the picture Width and Height controls to Quick Access Toolbar they work until Live Writer is restarted. After that the max value they can hold is 100 and notice also that they incorrectly show one decimal.

I wish for the ability to reorder controls on the Quick Access Toolbar something that can be done in for example Word and Excel.

See also:

Windows Live Writer 2011 beta and IE9 beta test

Open old posts in Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer 2011 reviewed

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

AutoCAD Ironman

The next release of AutoCAD is in development & codenamed "Ironman".  More details on getting involved in the pre-release beta program soon.

All Autodesk beta programs are run from http://beta.autodesk.com where you need to sign up to be able to participate. If the AutoCAD naming is the same as previous years the next release will be AutoCAD 2012.

Via Between the Lines

Monday, November 8, 2010

Autodesk Design Suite

Check out the Design Suite page and the video there. Autodesk Design Suite is a bundle of AutoCAD, Alias Sketch for AutoCAD, 3ds Max Design, Autodesk Showcase and Alias Design.

Design Suite

See also previous post: Autodesk Design Suits bundles

Slow Sheet Set Manager solution

If you suddenly get performance problem with a Sheet Set that previously did work good the problem might be related to that any of the paths or files points to a location that does not exists or have been moved. Check all paths and make sure they exists. Remember to check also paths to templates and so on.

To some extent SSMPropEditor can help but if you need to find all paths saved in the DST file you can open the DST file in SSMPropEditor and you will find a temporary XML file created in the %TEMP% folder that you can open in a text editor or XML editor and review. But if you want to make changes to it and save back to DST you will need our DST Converter.

The DST converter is useful for IT or CAD Managers to correct performance problems with SSM Sheet Sets that started to perform badly. The program converts a DST file to an XML file that can be edited in an XML editor or Notepad and then converted back to DST. One customer used it to replace some dead paths in an SSM file and made a 50 sheet set of construction dwgs each open in 20 seconds instead of the 1½-2 minutes it was taking. Another customer found that the size of the DST was increasing more than reasonable and was able to manually compress and remove erroneous data. Eventually found out that changing the "include in publish" status was what caused the bloat. 1 license of DST Converter is 5 EUR. Contact us for details.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Vuuch 3.5 Launched

Vuuch 3.5 Launched
Enterprise Social System for Manufacturers
Updated with Advanced New Features

Wayland, MA, November 2, 2010 – Vuuch, creator of the first enterprise social system (ESS) for manufacturers, today announced the availability of Vuuch™ 3.5. Vuuch is social technology for manufacturers of tangible products – everything from airplanes to toasters. By applying social technology to the product development process, Vuuch revolutionizes the way products are designed and manufactured. Following closely on the recent release of Vuuch 3.0, Vuuch 3.5 leverages software-as-a-service (SaaS) to respond rapidly to customer requirements. SaaS also makes it possible for customers to easily employ Vuuch, even for product development projects already under way.

“Vuuch is an enterprise social system that understands products, people and how they interact. As a result, Vuuch allows product teams to work together in ways that traditional collaborative extensions to product lifecycle management (PLM) products do not,” said Chris Williams, CEO, Vuuch. “Much of today’s existing manufacturing technology is focused on record-keeping – recording the final decisions about the design or manufacture of a product. By contrast, Vuuch is focused on the decision-making process, which helps manufacturers reap sustainable competitive advantage. With Vuuch, design, finance, production, marketing and sales decisions are made faster and more accurately than ever before.”

New and improved features in Vuuch 3.5
Import of product assemblies and parts from SolidWorks
®. The Vuuch 3.5 SolidWorks plugin now allows designers to automatically populate Vuuch with the entire CAD product structure. Thereafter, the complete set of social technology features of Vuuch 3.5 are available to manage tasks, issues, discussions and the deliverables associated with the product structure.

Once imported to Vuuch 3.5, the CAD model becomes a “decision-based” bill-of-materials (BOM) that helps the product development team manage the product through all phases of its development. Each activity in Vuuch can be directly represented in the CAD model, linking the product design with all the metadata about that part and/or assembly. Vuuch maintains the representation of items in the SolidWorks model without requiring any change in CAD file management, a major convenience for users.

Custom pages. A Vuuch page represents something the team cares about and/or wants to track. In previous releases, Vuuch pages could represent Microsoft® Office® items, including Microsoft Word®, PowerPoint®, Excel® files as well as parts, products and CAD files. A “generic” Vuuch page type allowed users to represent deliverables other these. By sorting on the type of deliverable, users can quickly answer common questions like, “What Word files am I working on for this project?” “What issues are there with a specific part?” and “Who has been invited to follow this SolidWorks file?”

In Vuuch 3.5, users can now create Vuuch pages that represent anything they choose. Examples of custom pages include an engineering change order (ECO) page or a company-specific page to track a unique product feature or process. Custom page types can also be created to represent an entire product.

Each custom page takes advantage of the ESS’s full capabilities: activities can be created on that custom page, users can be dynamically invited to follow it, and it will appear in users’ lists as a new Vuuch page that can be sorted and searched. With Vuuch custom pages, the ESS’s power to represent items the team cares about is now unlimited.

Domain management and administration. Vuuch 3.5 now offers authorized users the ability to view and analyze information about Vuuch usage across their company. Once properly authorized, domain administrators may access useful statistical and analytical information including the number of Vuuch pages that have been created, the types of Vuuch pages that have been created and domain-wide usage. With domain management, Vuuch users can easily determine where problems and issues are being created and can roll up this information for reporting and analysis. It is important to remember that Vuuch domain administration does not impose a user administration burden on the domain manager, as is customary in legacy collaboration systems. Vuuch users still “friend” and “follow” Vuuch pages dynamically, using the system’s social features, all without the need for pre-defined access control lists.

New activity types. Three new activity types have been added to Vuuch pages. Info and FAQ activity types permit invited participants of the activity to develop content designed for public consumption, while limiting uninvited participants to viewing the conclusions and outcomes of that activity. In this way, social technology can be used to unite the development of content that has both public and private aspects. A Requirements activity has also been added that allows product development teams to specifically flag an activity as something that impacts the product design or manufacture.

Dashboard widgets. In Vuuch 3.5, users’ home pages have been enhanced to automatically display three sets of graphs. One of these graphs shows the number of pages the user is following by status. Another displays overdue Vuuch activities, categorizing the overdue work by the number of days it has been outstanding. The final graph displays the due dates of upcoming Vuuch activities, again categorizing them graphically by the number of days until those activities are due. Clicking any of the bars in these new graphical widgets produces a list of the selected activities, allowing users to focus on the product development tasks and issues that need their attention the most.

“One of the pressing questions manufacturers must answer is how they are going to apply technology to the product development process,” said Oleg Shilovitsky, industry analyst and blogger, BeyondPLM.com. “Vuuch offers an inventive new approach to streamline these processes, while being compatible with the investments manufacturers have already made in PLM and CAD.”

Pricing, availability and supported systems
Vuuch is available as an annual subscription. Users who create Vuuch pages require a paid license. Other users may access those pages and update those pages without a paid license. With the launch of Vuuch 3.5, the company is offering special introductory pricing of $250 per year per Vuuch page creation license.

Vuuch 3.5 is delivered as a service, so there is no installation or setup needed. The Vuuch 3.5 web UI supports major browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer®, Mozilla Firefox® and Google® Chrome®. Optional Vuuch add-ins allow team members to access the ESS directly from within Microsoft Office 2007, SolidWorks®, Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Autodesk Inventor® and Pro/ENGINEER®.

About Vuuch
Vuuch (www.vuuch.com), the first enterprise social system (ESS) for manufacturers, is revolutionizing the way products are developed. Vuuch’s social software is the only manufacturing-specific social technology that connects product development teams together with their deliverables, cutting time-to-market and the cost of developing products while improving quality. Founded in 2009 by a team of CAD and PLM industry veterans, Vuuch’s people-centric PLM capabilities offer manufacturers a new way to improve productivity that is compatible with existing investments in CAD, PLM and desktop applications. Vuuch is privately-held and based in Wayland, MA.

Vuuch for AutoCAD
Vuuch is also available for the AutoCAD platform via the Vuuch for AutoCAD plug-in from JTB World.

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