PTC announced a pair of new products this week designed to promote visual collaboration of product designs, including the ability to share complex 3-D models with colleagues and suppliers traditionally not outfitted with full-blown CAD seats.
ProductView 9.1, an upgrade to PTC’s visualization software, has been completely rearchitected to take advantage of the parallel threading capabilities of multi-core CPUs, boosting its performance ten-fold compared to earlier versions, according to Tom Shoemaker, PTC’s vice president of product marketing. “We’ve rearchitected the file format and taken it down radically to gain big performance improvements,” Shoemaker says. “That’s important for loading and viewing big files along with large assemblies on standard hardware configurations.”
Scalability is another big benefit of the new release, Shoemaker says. ProductView 9.1 has been designed to be a single visual collaboration platform, supporting customers who need just a simple desktop viewing tool all the way through organizations that require visualization capabilities for exploring massive million-part digital mockups. Previously, companies would have to choose different types of visualization tools for these different types of requirements, Shoemaker says.
The second addition to PTC’s lineup is Windchill ProductPoint, a solution for sharing product development data based on Microsoft’s popular SharePoint collaboration platform and .NET framework. Windchill ProductPoint, which offers multi-CAD SharePoint services for managing both PTC's Pro/Engineer and third-party CAD solutions, appeals to the needs of organizations both large and small, according to Shoemaker. Small companies, he says, may find its file management and collaboration capabilities sufficient in place of having to buy a full-fledged PDM system. “Companies with a couple of seats of Pro/E typically manage files with a network drive and creative naming conventions and hope that no one overwrites the file when they put it in a shared folder,” he says. “There’s no versioning and no security. That’s one audience we’re trying to serve.”
The other audience is larger organizations, which already have PDM and PLM foundations in place. In those cases, ProductPoint can be tapped to make the information more widely available to employees or suppliers who don’t necessarily have PDM seats.
Windchill ProductPoint will ship in December; ProductView 9.1 is slated for delivery in September.
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 Windchill ProductPoint’s multi-CAD SharePoint services offer basic functions for managing Pro/E data as well as other CAD file formats. |
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