CoCreate Software Inc. has revealed plans to offer an entry-level version of its collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM) software that promises to give manufacturers a secure and inexpensive way for partners, as well as non-engineers across the enterprise, to review design documents.
OneSpaceLive! is built on the same Microsoft .Net and XML architecture as CoCreate's OneSpace.net collaborative PLM software, permitting interoperability with third-party CAD and CAE applications that adhere to these emerging Web services standards. Users can also share and review designs created with CoCreate's PLM and CAD tools.
In addition to built-in instant messaging that detects team members' presence and allows for secure communications over the Internet, OneSpaceLive! also provides tools that enable designers to capture screens, add notes and save documents as PDFs for archival purposes. Also included in OpenSpaceLive! is a team workspace that is directly integrated with Windows Explorer to enable dispersed workgroups (with proper authentication) to share files across firewalls.
OneSpace Live! will be available in September as either a hosted or a packaged product. Pricing is set at $60 per user per month as a hosted product, or $495 per user as a perpetual license.
While offering a subset of OneSpace.net's functionality, OneSpaceLive! lists for roughly half the price of its predecessor, which is about 20% below what general-purpose packages such as WebEx and Microsoft's NetMeeting charge for Web-enabled application sharing, CoCreate said. But unlike commercial packages that often choke on memory-intensive CAD and CAE drawings, OneSpaceLive! -- like its predecessor -- features proprietary file compression technology said to speed data transmission by 15% compared with comparable application sharing services.
Unlike NetMeeting and WebEx, OneSpaceLive! is designed with manufacturers' more rigorous confidentiality and scalability concerns in mind, CoCreate said. All information transmitted over OneSpaceLive! is protected via secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption. And while commercial packages are offered in one-size-fits-all packaging, OneSpaceLive! allows manufacturers to test the design collaboration waters and easily upgrade to OneSpace.net (for those familiar with applications built on Microsoft foundation technologies), noted Scott Carlin, CoCreate's marketing director.
"We built in all these features well ahead of competitors, but in a high-end package," he said. "Now we've put some of them in a [lower-end] discrete box for people that want to step more gently into collaboration."
OneSpaceLive! has compelling curb appeal, said John MacKrell, a senior consultant a CIMdata, Inc., a PLM research firm in Ann Arbor, MI. "It's coming from a company that is engineering oriented, so I would expect it to get some traction with heavy CAD types of users."
OneSpaceLive! is currently being beta tested by a small number of unidentified companies across the manufacturing spectrum, a CoCreate spokesman said. Companies across the electronics industry, and in discrete or heavy manufacturing, are early targets -- as are enterprises that want to extend collaboration across departmental boundaries within and beyond the enterprise, he noted.
With low-end needs soon to be addressed, the Fort Collins, CO and Sindelfingen, Germany based company will soon turn its attention to integrating collaborative capabilities into its CAD and PLM tools, Carlin noted. The upstream move makes sense given similar strategies undertaken by UGS and PTC with their collaborative offerings. "The only thing [CoCreate's collaborative products] don't have is built-in CAD functionality," MacKrell concluded.