MCAD Design Collaboration: tools and tips for connecting design teams

CADalyst,  June, 2004  by Don LaCourse

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Design collaboration is one area of MCAD technology where the dreams and wishes of designers are actually coming to fruition. Designers have traditionally had a hard enough time collaborating with a partner in the next cubicle, let alone working with a sales rep across town or supplier across the Atlantic.

This month, I'll share with you a few exciting design collaboration solutions that can make your design cycle a little easier. I look at an online solution, CoCreate's OneSpace.net; a third-party solution, ImpactXoft IX SPeeD V5 Suite; and an integrated solution, Solid Edge Insight. Each option brings new and exciting pieces of the design collaboration puzzle together to the benefit of hardworking designers like you.

A special thank you to these developers for taking the time to share information about their design collaboration solutions. Without their innovative minds, the dreams of the past would simply be forgotten.

CoCreate OneSpace.net

OneSpace.net (www.onespace.net) is a lightweight tool for online project collaboration among members of product development teams. It combines familiar concepts such as organized projects, secure messaging, presence awareness, and real-time online meetings. OneSpace.net provides a rapidly deployable solution that enables design teams to share ideas and resolve problems across the Web no matter where they are located (figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

OneSpace.net's application-sharing capability lets you view any application on another team member's desktop. This means all team members can see and comment on designs regardless of the original CAD or design platform (figure 2).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

OneSpace.net's Model Explorer lets you accurately visualize, interrogate, and mark up engineering data such as 2D and 3D models. It supports standard design exchange formats so that you can work in a multi-CAD environment. Optional CAD converters load into the Model Explorer 3D models from popular MCAD systems such as I-DEAS, Pro/ENGINEER, Unigraphics, CATIA, and SolidWorks.

OneSpace.net requires Windows 2000/XP, Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher, and a DSL or faster Internet connection. Visit www.onespace.net for more information or to download a trial version of OneSpace.net.

ImpactXoft IX SPeeD V5 Suite

IX SPeeD V5 Suite (www.impactxoft.com) is a third-party CATIA V5 collaborative 3D design environment that lets you implement, share, merge, and communicate design changes more quickly and efficiently during the highly iterative work-in-progress phase.

For several decades now, designers have relied on the classic design tree or parametric modeling approach. Though effective, this approach lacks the flexibility of emerging methodologies that speed up product development by removing bottlenecks and tie-ups. In addition, most designers today still rely on tools that are not fully Internet-enabled, thereby losing the time-saving benefits the Internet offers (figures 3a and b). ImpactXoft's concept of SPD (simultaneous product development) addresses long-standing challenges in the design industry, such as:

* developing products and delivering them on schedule, * coordinating real-time communications between suppliers and partners, * managing the product lifecycle, including design requirement planning through field service and retirement, * encouraging product innovation and quality, * minimizing design and development cycle time and cost, and * using emerging technologies.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The methodology behind ImpactXoft's solution is represented by two unique technologies. IX Functional Modeling lets you focus on defining design behaviors and functional rules in an order-independent manner while the software automatically generates a geometric model. Order independence means that you can create features without worrying about the order in which you build them. IX Instant Participation is a method based on parallel design that significantly shortens design cycles by letting you transmit design changes via e-mail and wireless devices and instantly share and merge those changes.

Solid Edge Insight

Solid Edge Insight (www.solid-edge.com/ insight) integrates CAD, design management, and Web-based collaboration into a single tool that's easy to implement and manage. Insight removes perceived barriers to PDM implementation while still providing the fundamental capabilities that companies need to successfully manage design data (figure 4 p. 44).

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Insight manages product information in a manner that is unobtrusive in your daily CAD work. The foundation for this product, Sharepoint v2 from Microsoft, makes a leap forward from the previous version in terms of performance, scalability, and administration. In V15, Solid Edge Insight capitalizes on these improvements.

Solid Edge V15 also introduces new capabilities to its design management client, Insight Connect. Users can access, view, and mark up a variety of design-related documents, facilitating engineering workflows and making collaboration easier, while ensuring that data remains managed and secure. Solid Edge V15 also introduces a new PCF (packaged collaboration file) format that packages multiple documents into a single file (figure 5).