Siemens PLM Software Blog

Synchronous Technology Hits Northern Europe

2008-08-28T10:45:52Z

I am traveling in Denmark and Sweden this week, speaking with existing users and prospects about Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology. Everyone is back from holiday and eager to start a new chapter. The response to Synchronous Technology has been overwhelming. Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of over 200 in Denmark, the excitement in the air was clear. Many folks are just dying to get their hands on it – which they now can, as shipments have begun just this week. Of the many benefits of Synchronous Technology, two resonated very clearly with these crowds, as it has with others. EVERYONE now has to work with customers and suppliers and a variety of CAD formats as the data changes hands. The power of Solid Edge to edit data in the same intuitive way, regardless of source, is a hit with virtually everyone – they can immediately see putting this aspect into practice. Another item that rings consistently true with each audience is the pain of editing a design that they didn’t personally create. When I ask, “how many of you have had to edit someone else’s part,” 80% of the room raises their hands! This is a shockingly high number, to me, but I guess this is the reality of today’s environment where every user is asked to do more with less. They all laugh and nod their heads knowingly when I ask if the day they edit someone else’s model is the day they wished they were on vacation. The hours of productivity lost planning out modeling approaches or debugging someone else’s modeling approach are unfathomable. To these folks, the value of Synchronous Technology is immediately clear. One of the mantras we used to guide the development of Synchronous Technology was “Create once, edit forever.” The crowds here in northern Europe make it clear that this tenet was spot on. I look forward to these customers getting their hands on the technology and deploying it to make their companies more successful than ever before.

Elvis Has Left the Building

2008-08-25T14:20:20Z

Someone here started calling Solid Edge ST “Elvis”. I got an email last week that “Elvis has left the building”, referring to the release of our new product to manufacturing.

Solid Edge ST does have a lot in common with Elvis. Solid Edge ST was born just down the road from where Elvis was born. Elvis made a huge impact in music with his form of “Rockabilly”, the fusion of some great music ideas added to his own personal style. Sold Edge ST will make an impact in the CAD world because if its own unique style. Elvis was flashy. If you’ve watched the videos of Solid Edge ST or seen the effort marketing has put into this release, you’d probably agree Solid Edge ST is flashy too. Elvis’s unique way of doing music was controversial at first. Getting rid of the history tree in CAD is controversial too.

Perhaps the biggest keys to the success of Elvis were his talent and his fans. I know there are some talented people that worked on Solid Edge ST, so come see “Elvis” live and maybe you will become a fan too!

BTW, Solid Edge ST, English, is now available for download at: http://ftp.ugs.com/download.php

Practical Social Media for Engineers and Designers

2008-08-10T23:28:10Z

According to Wikipedia, “Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.” The social interaction often results in different degrees of community building.

If you regularly frequent news groups or particular blogs, you probably pick up a sense of their community. For engineering and CAD folks, these are great places to share information, ask questions, and learn more about the tools you are using.

What has been interesting in recent years is the growth of other social media applications focused more on this community aspect. For Engineers and designers these expand the ability to interact with others with similar interest, share information, or profit from others knowledge.

I wanted to share a few applications and web sites that might be useful to those engineers and designers just getting started. While there are many fun and entertaining sites, I wanted to keep this list focused on those sites that actually support you in your work. These are sites that I have found that either allow you to connect with other CAD users, allow you find more information on how to do your job, or allow you to share information to benefit the larger CAD communities.

Twitter – I have been using Twitter a long time and SiemensPLM is officially there. Blogger SolidSmack gave a nice rundown on Twitter and lists many of the CAD folks that are there already there. Of course, Josh (SolidSmack) uses some *other* CAD program but he was good enough to list many of the SiemensPLM folks as well as some general CAD tweeters. If any Solid Edge or NX folks create a similar list of our users, I’d love to see it!

To many, twitter (and similar applications) seem like they would be a waste of time. Who wants to know when “burhop” is getting coffee? In reality, once you start following the right people you can get very timely and useful information.

SlideShare – We all use Power Point for all types of things. SlideShare provides a way to share your presentation with everyone. Have you created Solid Edge training that could help others? Maybe you are looking for information on six-sigma? Here are some examples of what can be found on SlideShare:

Six Sigma

View SlideShare presentation (tags: sigma six)

And what is this social media thing anyway?

Social Media Is...

View SlideShare presentation (tags: socialmedia enterprise2.0 social media)

Second Life – Ok, I’ve written a few blogs about Second Life but lets face it, it could be a few years before it is in general use. On the other and it’s a great tool for making pretty renderings of just about any size. Do you need a shop scene for your engine part? Maybe you need a water scene for your latest aquatic design? Maybe you are a rocket designer and need a good space scene. Just start up Second Life, find a good location, take a high resolution image, and use that image for the background when you render you CAD design.

Here's an example of a carburetor rendered over top of a shop scene in Second Life:

Second Life does some great water scenes. Do you have a boat design that might look good in front of this?

Flickr and Picassa – You may already be using these sites to share pictures with family. There are other good photo applications too. You can also use these sites to share pictures or images of your designs. This makes it much easier to share with customers or others and for others to reuse your image.

Linkedin – is kind of a facebook for professionals. Ever dig out an old business card and find out the person has moved on? Need to contact an old CAD buddy because your company has an opening? Linked in allows you to manage all these professional relationships.

Sticking with our social media theme, maybe this video will help in understanding Linkedin:

Youtube, blip.tv, CADJunky – The videos there are how-to’s for design, product examples and many other tutorials. Basically anything you can put on video can be there. One of the problems with Youtube is that many companies still block it - too many COOPs watching skateboarding videos, I heard. So you might also check blip.tv. If you want to focus just on CAD videos, CADJunky is useful as well. Here is a link to a recent video made on FEA analysis from Second Life. If you can view it, blip TV is not being blocked : http://blip.tv/file/1106482/

If you render videos in your favorite CAD system, these are easily uploaded to the above sites. Here is one I uploaded to youtube:

WordPress.com – Maybe you are an expert on CAD. Maybe you have been using the Solid Edge ST beta and have useful information to share for those who will be getting started with ST in a few weeks. Starting a blog is a great way to give back to the CAD community. WordPress.com makes blogging pretty easy. Google, Yahoo and many others provide blogging software as well.

The point is, blogging is really pretty easy with today’s tools and if you pick a topic you know, its really doesn’t take much more time than writing an email. Why not share this information with the whole CAD community?

Wikis – Wikis are another great way to share information. Although less social than other forms, they provide a way of storing and organizing persistent information valuable to a community. Wikis require the community to continuously contribute information but once running are far more useful than most other sources of information. For Solid Edge, I know of one Wiki that was recently started is here. If you use another CAD system, you can often find wiki’s for them too.

There are many other social media applications. Maybe you or your family use some of them. Facebook and Myspace, Plurk, tumblr and brightkite are a few I use. The ones above are just a few I've found useful for CAD and engineering. If you have found other social media applications useful to you as an Engineer or CAD user, please post a reply or send me an email. I'm always eager to learn more!

Boeing takes off

2008-07-30T13:25:00Z

There’s big goings on today at the largest aerospace corporation in the world. Boeing has decided to expand their implementation of Teamcenter to both new and selected legacy programs. Aerospace programs have some of the longest lifecycles out there, so this decision means that there could be data that started its life on a drafting board being stored in Teamcenter. It also means that Boeing is going to count on Teamcenter to enable design, build and service anywhere for selected current and future programs– a true testament to its scalability, adaptability and openness. I got a few minutes with Tim Nichols this morning to get the inside scoop on the Boeing decision and what it means for multi-national companies struggling to deal with the valuable information in their legacy systems and the challenges of optimizing the performance of a vast global enterprise with the stunning capabilities of the new PLM platform.

Boeing Interview with Tim Nichols

Engineering in Second Life

2008-07-20T23:29:20Z

In my last blog, I gave an introduction to virtual worlds. If you are interested in Virtual Worlds for engineering, I thought I’d share some information on an upcoming event and some links to interesting places.

First of all, I will be doing a Second Life presentation Tuesday, July 22 at 9:30 SLT (12:30 EST). It will be an introduction to FEA but is also some continued experimentation with virtual worlds. I’ll make use of Femap Express toward the end. Even if you are not a Femap Express user, it is very similar to the Strengh Wizard in NX and Cosmos Express in SolidWorks so it should be useful to anyone wanting to know more about FEA.

Everyone is welcome to attend even if you just want to see what these virtual worlds and Second Life are like. We haven’t done a lot of advertising about this as it is a learning experience too. Of course, people reading my blog get special treatment with this notice

If you haven’t used SL before, its a good to get a login, practice flying, teleporting and set up your speaker to hear what is being said. You can get the login here:

https://join.secondlife.com/

Once SL is installed, you can use SLURLS (Second Life URLs) to teleport to SL locations form web sites and blogs. I’ll add a few engineering related SLURLs at the end.

If you are interested in knowing what is happening with engineering in SL, one web site to visit is “Grid Works”. CivilE Writer (Pam Renoir in real life) is a professional engineer who runs this site and an online magazine. She has also set up an engineering group within Second Life.

As engineers, there are a number of interesting places to visit in Second Life. If you are just interested in CAD, you can visit our own island or those of a number of other CAD companies:

Siemens Innovation Connection http://slurl.com/secondlife/Siemens%20Innovation%20Connection/128/128/22

SolidWorks http://slurl.com/secondlife/SolidWorks/128/128/17

AutoDesk http://slurl.com/secondlife/Autodesk/118/119/24

(why am I linking to the competition? According to social media guru Jeremiah Owyang, “if I put your interests first, you will come back to me” ).

If you are interested in engineering technology, or how others are making use of Second Life, some good locations are:

NASA and the Space Flight Museum http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/116/144/23

Public works Island http://slurl.com/secondlife/Public%20Works/43/54/31

TED Conference http://slurl.com/secondlife/Allston/169/81/25

EOLUS One http://slurl.com/secondlife/EOLUS/56/140/30

There are others and the list is growing. If you know a good one, post a comment!

Virtual World Primer for CAD people

2008-07-17T23:07:01Z

Virtual Worlds are a growing segment on the Internet. It has been an area of interest and hobby of mine for few years so it’s fun to watch as it starts to cross over to the mainstream. The basic concepts are not too hard. You have an “Avatar” which represents you, usually some set of assets that your avatar owns, and some type of environment your avatar exists within - the virtual world. It sounds like something more important to gamers and programmers than businesses. It probably was just a couple years ago.

With all the changes and investment going on with virtual world (VW) technology, I thought I’d spend a bit of time talking about how we got where we are and where we are going. Now there are many, many blogs out there on virtual worlds so I thought I’d try to keep this in the context of a CAD users. We do 3D all the time and are perhaps a bit closer to using VW technology than the average person.

The beginning ideas for Virtual Worlds have been around for some time. The Sensorama machine was created back in 1962. Ivan Sutherland later created what most consider the first head-mounted display system for virtual reality around 1968. If Dr. Sutherland’s name sounds familiar to you, he was the same person that created Sketchpad, the ancestor to modern CAD.

More mainstream use of virtual worlds started showing up in the late 1970’s as computer games and networks started to take hold. Multi User Dungeon (MUD, also called British Legends) came about in 1978 and is considered one of the first virtual worlds. It was text based and used TELNET.

Newer and better applications that use Virtual World concepts continued to grow from here. The ability for avatars to interact, work together on common tasks, share assets and view the environment together can be both useful and entertaining. Still, the technology seemed to be used only in a few small niches. Games are probably one of the big exceptions to this. Most serious investment came from here until just recently.

It is not that there is a shortage of ideas for how to use virtual technologies for things other than games. Ideas are all over in the Sci-Fi world. Just look to movies like TRON created in 1982 or more recently the Matrix. These might be a bit extreme but there are plenty more practical ideas. NASA has made use of some excellent VW simulations. The main problems for those with lesser budgets have been the technology and cost.

Along with pure computing power, a serious graphics processor is needed to render a dynamic virtual world. Here, virtual worlds are benefitting from much of the other work being done for 3D display required for games, movies, science and engineering. It definitely helps to have a high end CAD video card!

Another problem is network bandwidth and latency. For a world to be shared, it must be displayed on each user’s computer. If my avatar stands up or moves a chair, people watching this from their computer should see this in real time (or as close to real-time as possible). That means you need low latency. If you avatar pulls out a model of a rocket engine, that means the geometric description of the rocket must be downloaded to your computer to see it. The more detailed the rocket, the higher bandwidth you need.

Yet another problem is an effective user interface, either hardware or software based, for working in 3D. Looking to Second Life, almost 90% of the people that try it do not return. Part of this is that learning to control your avatar and interact with the 3D environment is hard. Only recently have some of the tools used by CAD developers started to show up in virtual worlds (i.e. 3D mice). Still, there is no common way of working in 3D like there is in 2D with a mouse.

Going back to 2003, this was the point where enough of these technology problems had been addressed to at least make a go at more mainstream virtual worlds. Second Life by Linden Labs got started at this time. It is not the only virtual world out there but is perhaps the most known non-game virtual world being used today. World of War Craft is probably the largest game oriented virtual world. Both of these have several million users.

Today, other virtual worlds and technologies are coming on-line at a very fast pace. Not only does this include proprietary and complete systems like Second Life, it also includes a number of open systems like OpenSim and Croquet, file formats for transferring data between systems (COLLADA), components such as physics engines. Focus on business need is also becoming a priority. For example, some of these virtual world servers can be hosted inside a company’s firewall allowing for Intranet virtual worlds.

Most recently, Google launched Lively, a kind of web based virtual world. While it is perhaps a bit more cartoonish than Second Life, with much less functionality, it is easier to use and likely improve over the coming months and years (it is Google, after all).

What does this mean for the CAD world?

There are several reasons virtual worlds are potentially interesting for engineers, architects, industrial designers, and CAD. Firstly, these worlds are 3D. Your avatar can take out a copy of part or design and lay it on a virtual table. If you design buildings or factories you can create a mock-up and allow other avatars to walk though the design. You can animate the machines. These are things being done today to some limited extent in Second Life.

Secondly, these worlds are naturally collaborative and immersive. Social networking is another hot area in software and internet development and virtual worlds have, to a certain extent, tapped into this. So while social networks of engineers exist in places like Facebook, Yahoo groups or internal newsgroups, virtual worlds provide a way to do this in 3D. You can set up persistent war rooms or product displays and interact with designers and engineers all over the world. Unlike a web presentation or conference call, virtual worlds give a feeling of presence.

All of this is not to say virtual worlds have finally arrived. Graphics cards still need to be faster. Network connections need to be faster and we still need better 3D user interfaces. For businesses, security is still an issue. You certainly don’t want to share your latest design prototype in a virtual world and not control who can see it.

Speaking of sharing your design in a virtual world, this is still a issue that is not getting as much attention as many would like. To avoid problems with network bandwidth, Second Life supports only a limited number of primitives to represent geometry. There are no Booleans and the number of primitives you can practically use in a region is limited. There are a number of people and organizations working on point solutions to this within the limits of existing virtual worlds. Recall that Siemens sponsored some work though the University of Cincinnati for this. If you tour Siemens Innovation connection or some of the other CAD islands, you will see a number of products that have been recreated there. However, we are still a long way from being able to push a button and have the CAD design of your airplane or engine appear in Second Life.

I’m personally looking forward to improvements in VW geometry technology over the coming months and years. They can certainly represent much more complex data than they do today (with little or no increase in network traffic). Such improvements will be a interesting boon to those of us using high-end 3D authoring tools (like us CAD users).

Live Rules Advanced

2008-07-09T00:31:00Z

In my last blog, I gave an introduction to Live Rules. Today, I’ll move onto advanced Live Rules but before doing so, I wanted to point out that Ingenea created a very nice youtube video on Live Rules which I'm including below:

You can see Ingenea's blog here. Now, onto advanced Live Rules....

Advanced Live Rules

Consider the part below where the green face is selected. The coplanar live rule option is selected causing two coplanar faces to participate in the synchronous solve (the thin blue and yellow face). However, in this advanced example, we really only want the blue face to participate in the solve and the yellow face to remain where it is.

Using the Advanced panel for Live Rules, users can pick and choose which faces should obey the Live Rules and which can be ignored. The image below shows the geometry affected by the current options of Concentric, Coplanar, and Tangent Edges. Look to the bottom of the list and you will see the two planar faces that were identified with the “Coplanar” option.

Un-checking an entry removes it from the detected relationship and the element or elements will not participate in the move or rotate operation.

Hovering the cursor over an entry in the Advanced Live Rules PathFinder highlights the associated face in the graphics window.

After unckecking the yellow face (abofe) and rotating the original green face, you can see the result below:

The image below shows how the live rules that are selected affect what is displayed in the advanced window.

What you haven't seen in this post is how dimensions and PMI come into play with live rules. I'll try to find some exmaple of this for a future blog.

Can PLM help manufacturing cope with rising energy prices?

2008-07-01T00:10:32Z

Got a chance this morning to read today's Wall Street Journal cover to cover (3 hour plane flight with accidentally dead PC battery) and ran across an article discussing how skyrocketing energy costs are starting to impact manufacturers. The gist of the article is as higher energy costs translate in higher transport costs rise, some of basic assumptions used to build manufacturing strategies over the past couple of decades are starting to unravel. The availability of cheap transport is fundamental to two of the biggest trends in manufacturing: just in time and offshore. It seems that when it starts to cost twice as much to ship parts and products across the world that some manufacturers are starting to rethink how and where things get made.

As I was reading, I started to think about ways that PLM might be able to help with this problem. A few of the ideas that I came up with:

Make lighter weight components. This saves both transport and operating costs if the product is mobile.
Copy factory setups from one location to another. One of the big arguments to getting one big factory setup is that you learn faster and can share hose learnings with all lines. The digital factory aspects of PLM can make this effect work across a distributed set of smaller factories that are optimized for getting the heavier items closer to the end user.
Make fixed cost lower component of overall factory cost. This makes higher labor cost countries more competitive.
Componentize design to allow for manufacturing of 'expensive to transport' components closest to destination. Sort of the same as the second point, but this is more focused on product rather than process design.

Interested to hear what other ideas are out there about how PLM can help deal with >140 bbl oil. Drop me any ideas in comments.

Live Rules Introduction

2008-06-19T10:44:54Z

Live Rules in Solid Edge ST provide a new way of working with CAD geoemetry. After talking about other new ideas like the Solid Edge Steering and the new Ribbon based UI, lets continue on with some more talk about some other innovation going on in in the CAD industry and Solid Edge ST.

Doug Stainbrook was good enough to share some information on Live Rules which I’ll borrow a bit here. Live Rules is the proprietary relationship recognition functionality that is an important component of Synchronous modeling. To keep things simple I’m going to talk about using live rules on a “dumb” part such as might have been imported from another CAD system (no existing parametrics, dimension, etc.) We'll hit the more advanced concepts later.

As faces and/or features are selected in the model, Solid Edge immediately locates any other elements in the model that match the Live Rules settings. The user has total control over what types of relationships are searched using the Live Rules UI (shown above) or can turn it off completely.

As related “Live Rule” geometry is located, Solid Edge ST will tell you which rules found a match and what the matching geometry is. Even before you start to move or rotate, you have feedback about what is going to happen. There are also ways to control (i.e.lock down) geometry which I'll talk about in a future blog.

So what are the live rules? Lets walk though a few from the dialog above:

Concentric (C)
• Will locate cylindrical faces in which the Axis of the elements are collinear
• 2D circles included

Coplanar (P)
• Will locate faces of the part that lie on the same plane
• Sketch Planes and Reference Planes included if checked

Tangent edges (T)
• Will locate tangencies related to the selected elements
• Will maintain tangencies during Synchronous Move or Rotate

Parallel (L)
• Used Mainly for rotating faces to keep associated elements parallel
• Will locate all faces Parallel to any face in the select set
• Sketch Planes and Reference Planes included if checked

Symmetric about base (S)
• Will locate all elements in the model that are symmetric about the base reference origin to any face in the select set

Same radius if possible (A)
• Controls modifications such that radius
• values are maintained when the model is modified

When “off” radius values will change as needed to complete the operation

I hope this partial list gives you some ideas on the basics of Live Rules and how they work. If you noticed on the dialog above there is an avanced section which I will blog about in the future. If there is anything in particular with Live Rules you are interested in, post a comment and I'll try to cover that as well.

Greening the executive suite

2008-06-17T19:54:00Z

Umair has a good post on the Harvard Business blog on the management DNA changes necessary for companies to really go green. What caught my attention was this excerpt:

They’re going to discover that the same principles of management are necessary to make companies green as those that we’ve been discussing at the edge: democratization, openness, transparency, love, and a fierce embrace of what’s good – to name just a few.

That's a pretty fundamental change and it's pretty clear that so far there are some companies that get it, some that are trying and some that need a little help.

The interesting thing is that these same requirements (democratization, openness, transparency) have been in place for companies looking to get an innovation advantage through product lifecycle management. Democratization because the best ideas can come from anywhere in the company, openness because best in class companies are able to operate in what Henry Chesbrough calls "Open Innovation" and transparency because using a PLM system in a silo consistently sub-optimizes results. So in the race to become green it will be interesting to watch and see if companies that have become innovation leaders through PLM are able to get to green sooner than the competition. If Umair is right in outlining the requirements, they seem to have all the skills mastered.

PLM, Pacific-style

2008-06-17T17:41:00Z

This morning I got a note from a colleague in Korea, sharing their experience with 2008 Siemens PLM Day that happened one week ago. If you speak Korean, you can view most of the presentations from that day!

Much like the PLM World event that Chris, Mark, John and I covered, Korea had 800+ people who enjoyed presentations covering Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology, NX6, Digital Manufacturing, Simulation including Femap and much more! Enjoy this short 3 minute video highlighting the event.

Why The Ribbon Bar is Right

2008-06-15T11:39:19Z

The advancements in the upcoming Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology release are causing a lot of discussion. Synchronous Technology is getting a good part of the interest but this is only part of the transformation users will see.

Putting Synchronous Technology aside, customers that continue to work with the traditional history based Solid Edge technology will still see the new Microsoft Office Ribbon based user interface. Changing the UI can have a big impact on software users so it can be a hot topic.

Long before the changes happening now with many CAD user interfaces, Microsoft spent a lot of time iterating on a design that would justify their own changes with sufficient improvement in ease-of-use and productivity. If you want to know more about this, a good blog on the story of the ribbon as well as this Slide share presentation below:

| View | Upload your own

Now interface design is hard because you have so many different types of software users. So it is not surprising there is still a lot of debate on how successful Microsoft is with this new Ribbon Bar design. I’ve been using it for a while and do find it more productive but anytime you change UI, there is a learning curve.

Microsoft’s hope is for Ribbon Bar implementers to embrace the following principles (From Microsoft’s Office 2007 UI for developers)

Focus. The user’s attention should be on the content, not on the UI. The results-oriented approach allows the user to perform sophisticated formatting and advanced tasks without diverting their attention from the document or content on which they are working.

Context. The contextualization of as many commands and properties as possible is crucial. Increase the user’s sense of mastery by reducing the number of choices presented at any given time. Reduce the command space by eliminating redundant or seldom used features.

Efficiency. Focus on efficiency rather than scope. Users must be able to find the most powerful features for the task quickly and easily. A small gain in the scope of features used is not worth a significant loss in the efficient use of the features.

Consistency. A results-oriented user experience is best accomplished by clearly providing intuitive ways to solve different problems. When applying tools to tasks, flexible consistency is desirable; homogeneity is not.

Permanence. Clearly defined access to tools ensures better usability. Ambiguity is reduced by establishing permanent homes for groups of features. A consistent-location UI is favored over a "smart" UI.

Predictability. The Microsoft Office applications offer a long and rich legacy of acceptance, upon which you can build successful UI innovation. Straightforward design ensures continued user comfort and maximized results. Favor the predictable over the novel.

Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology and many of the other CAD programs either following Microsoft’s style guide for Ribbon UI (Solid Edge ST) or implementing their own ribbon like interfaces we are seeing much of this ribbon discussion moving to the various CAD articles, blogs and forums. We CAD users have a lot of opinions on the subject. Even within Siemens, you will notice we have taken different directions for NX and Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology.

Catalyst had an interesting interview on the new AutoCAD Ribbon Bar and other CAD products are using it too. You can find a few blogs on the subject. Here is one on “Why the Ribbon is Wrong” which triggered a lively discussion. Its an interesting debate… do a custom UI for your CAD system or follow what is becoming a Windows standard?

Why the Ribbon is Right for Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology

Like many readers out there, I’ve used a lot of CAD systems over the years. I’m also spending significant time in Office 2007 or digging through the Microsoft Style guide or looking how to best optimize our own Solid Edge UI (we have UI experts that do this too), Like everyone else, I’ve got opinions on the subject.

The fact is, CAD functionality is ever increasing so having a better ways of organizing access to this functionality is something we are all looking for. The Ribbon Bar provides a way to make the most common functionality both easy to access and quickly visible to new users. Key functionality is a big icon and hard to miss. Less common functionality can still be found with a single click and smaller icons. Functionality unrelated to the task at hand can be moved out of the way (to a different group or tab) avoiding the visual clutter. Compare this to thinks like pull down menus where the best you might be able to do is put the more important things on the top of the list or worse, start creating sub menus.

Now I’m not saying everything is perfect with the Microsoft standard. I’d love for it to allow for more customization (although that has risks too). Depending on how you work, you may have different ideas on how it could be better. I do think the Ribbon is the right direction but when it comes to UI, there is no perfect solution.

So first, we have a standard, and one which has been fairly well researched to be as easy-to-use and productive as possible. The key, of course, is making sure the commands are exposed in the best possible way in the Ribbon Bar. It’s my opinion that many issues people have had with other Ribbon Bars is not so much with the Ribbon Bar concept but with how their software’s functionality gets implemented in this context. I know we spent most of our time working on getting our layout organized in the best possible way with the best possible controls. We got some great feedback from beta customers too and continue to discuss further UI optimizations going forward. I’m looking forward to the product release to see how our customers grade us.

The second point with the Ribbon bar, especially those that follow the Microsoft Ribbon Bar standard is the facility at which you can move between it and other products. Now I know there are still some CAD users than spend ALL day in their CAD product and would love everything to be optimized for just that work. However, most of us are moving between Word or Excel or PowerPoint or tools like Solid Edge. If you use Microsoft Office 2007, learning the Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology UI is just not that hard. If you are a new user, you are focused on learning CAD, not CAD AND the CAD UI. If you know CAD and are familiar with the Ribbon Bar, the transition is even faster. Even moving between ribbon based CAD products can become easier.

The last point is important. Synchronous Technology makes multi-CAD environments much easier. So while I think the new Ribbon Bar will increase existing user productivity, I also think it’s the best possible UI for the occasional Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology user – these people that don’t have the time to learn each and every custom CAD UI.

Still discovering the power (and excitement) of Synchronous Technology

2008-06-12T20:23:01Z

Even we - Siemens PLM Software - are continuously discovering the power that Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology will provide to our customers. At PLM Connections in Orlando, Mark Thompson and Dan Staples showed live demos of the latest release of Solid Edge. Since then, the team is working hard to finish the product for RTM this summer. Through this process, even our own engineers such as Mark are learning and sharing what Synchronous Technology can do. Below is an explanation about the Design with Imported Parts Demo (also available on YouTube) and how to do it faster! While I AM in marketing, Mark is an engineer, the same type of person who will be using Solid Edge on a daily basis. I love the way his excitement shows through with the three exclamation points

I have gotten a couple of calls on one of the demos where we read in the “feedingUnitBase.par” as foreign data and then use Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology to manipulate it. In the demo, we highlight the 2 ribs, then copy and paste them back into the model. We have found a faster way to do this. Highlight the 2 ribs as shown in the video, but instead of copying and pasting, simply click the copy option on the quickbar after you select them, then select the left secondary knob and just move the ribs to the left into the position you want. Since you selected copy, it will leave the originals where they are and you do not have to worry about getting them pasted back in correctly. This is a great way to do this! I have attached two pictures to show how I did this.

I was reminded of another option to copy the ribs even faster!!! Another option to copy the ribs is to simply hold down the “CTRL” key before selecting the secondary knob and it will also put you in copy mode. It just does not get any easier than this.

Getting broader exposure

2008-06-10T22:54:41Z

The wraps on Synchronous Technology continue to fall away. It started with a test drive station that was opened up for users at Siemens PLM Connection last week in Orlando that I did a short video of. Now there are sneak peeks going on around the world for interested parties. Scott got to sit in on one of these and posted his thoughts over on his blog (what is a harangue exactly anyway?). From the comment stream on Matt's post from a few days ago, it's pretty clear that the conversation isn't going to move along much until people can get their hands on it. Glad it won't be long - I think most will be pleasantly surprised, even with all the 'hype'.

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Addressing feature tree failure and recomputes

2008-06-10T19:10:00Z

Cory Goulden, CAD Administrator at National Steel Car, discusses his rules on what not to do in tradional history-based modeling: Thou shalt not: add rounds until final steps, model with no design intent, create a part without anticipating changes, etc...etc...Cory's 8-year old son Conor can design consumer products with the new Solid Edge. He showed a video to prove it. Cory said he was a big fan of James Dyson.