Articles tagged with Productpoint

Given the tag line, “Design without Barriers”, PTC are hosting their annual user event towards the tail end of next month. This follows the Global gathering of PTC users in Florida earlier this year with more scaled down, but more local event. It’s being held on the 24th November at the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon. The press release states that “Commencing at 0900am, with an introduction to PTC´s Technology and Vision roadmap, followed by over 12 presentations, 3 business tracks, and a networking lunch.”

Highlights of the day seem to be a hands-on introduction to Wildfire 5.0 (there’s also an in-depth review coming up in the next issue of DEVELOP3D), as well as looks into ProductPoint, PDMLink for larger organizations and Mathcad. A handful of customer will also be presenting, including the masters of all things cleaning related, VAX. As you would also expect, there’s an exhibition with resellers, partners and such.

Registration is now live at www.ptc.com/go/technologyforum

So, I don’t know if you heard, but there’s supposed to be some sort of global economic apocalypse happening. Would someone please tell my travel agent, because it seems that whilst the world is in financial freefall, I’m travelling more than ever, both within the UK and to the US. and its not just me, its the rest of the DEVELOP3D team too.

I’ve been in the US for a month of 2009 already this year and just got back from a trip to Portland and Arizona and I’m headed out to RAPID2009 in Chiacgo early next month. I’ve not been to RAPID before, so I’m pretty excited to see what’s on show. There’s pretty much three events that make my calender for a year on the rapid prototyping front. Euromold in Frankfurt at the tail end of the year and TCT Live just a few months before it in October in the UK.

RAPID is a new addition, organised by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and its on in Schaumburg, just outside of Chicago, 12 May to the 14th. A quick gander at the exhibitor list and all the big boys are there, Objet, Stratasys, EOS, Z Corp, all the reverse engineering guys as well as a some of the bigger service providers. It’ll be interesting to speak to the latter to see how things are going. I discovered a long while ago that talking to those that ’service’ the product development industry is a fantastic gauge for seeing how the industry is doing as a whole.

After that, next US trip is out to Orlando again for PTC/User 2009 – always an intriguing event. One thing I found interesting is that rather than, as they have in previous years, segregated the press/media from the users for all but a few select occasions, this year, we seem to have a lot more freedom to wander and to explore. Of course, with Wildfire 5 on its way very soon, I’ll be trying to find out a little more about what’s coming up and let you guys know. PTC also have another event on I’m going to try and make, that’s looking at Windchill ProductPoint, something I looked at in the last issue of DEVEVLOP3D. It’s running in the UK on the 7th of May at the Warwick Manufacturing Group International Centre. Details are here.

Which brings me to the point of my post. Are live events something you’re interested in? With staff reductions, greater work load and more pressure than ever, is a live event something you’d consider stepping foot out of the office for? I’m curious to know. I suspect the answer is a no, but if its a yes, I’d love to know the reason why.

#1: I’m currently in a very chilly Boston, attending PTC‘s annual Media and Analyst event and the proceedings have kicked off with some new announcements, so I’ll cover those as details emerge. First off, PTC has just launched its Windchill ProductPoint product, first shown at the PTC/User event in Long Beach. This sees the core, underlying processes and workflows from Windchill, applied to the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Flagged as the Social Product Development platform, this sees a layer of technology built onto the pretty much ubiquitous SharePoint platform, that adapts it from a generic document management and sharing platform, for the purposes of product development. This extends it to handle the more complex interactions between parts, assemblies and drawings typical within any 3D design system and gives you the ability to “vault and share structured information.”

PTC ProductPoint brings product design technology to the widely avialable SharePoint platform, such as managing complex data structures inherent in design systems (such as Pro/Engineer) and data visualisation tools from PTC’s ProductView technology.

Looking at the product from a very early stage, its clear that this is pretty interesting. With all of the standard SharePoint tools, such as document sharing, forums and wikis, the ProductPoint adds a two layer stack on top. The first is based on Windchill that allows you to control all of your office documents, typically Pro/E design data, but adds an additional layer that adds ProductView-based (which is perhaps one of the best kept technology secrets in the 3D world because of its ability to handle huge datasets in a highly efficient manner) viewing and mark-up facilities for not only Pro/Engineer data, but Mathcad.

Complex structure and data interaction is something that vanilla SharePoint can’t handle - ProductPoint adds this capability

Things like “where used” and “used by” searches based on complex assembly structures is something that standard SharePoint can’t handle.

But what intrigues me is what do PTC mean by Social Product Development? Are they just jumping on the ‘social’ bandwagon? To some extent, yes, they are. They aren’t the first to do so, and I’m pretty sure they won’t be the last in the 3D design world. This is perhaps the next stage in this industry as vendors either try to truly accept what’s happening in the online world or just simply attempt to reposition their existing products as providing those types of interaction methods. What is clear is that there’s a ground swell behind PTC’s management solutions (see the EADS deal as a good example) and building a seemingly very capable solution, based on a data management platform that’s already installed in most organisations, has 100 million licenses, makes a huge amount of sense.

PTC CEO, Dick Harrison - never a man to mince his words.

As PTC CEO Dick Harrison commented at today’s event “There’s no such thing as standalone 3D CAD anymore,” and every vendor worth their salt, is looking to find new ways to integrate design and data Management and add real value to the complex interaction between both data and the people authoring or influencing a product’s development.

Next up: Pro/Engineer WIldfire 5 - More Soon.