Continuing its push to facilitate more collaborative product development across the manufacturing enterprise, SolidWorks Corp. this week unveiled an updated version of its eDrawings e-mail-based tool that enables users of Microsoft Office, Autodesk AutoCAD, and Google SketchUp software to view, mark up, and measure design data without having CAD software installed on their systems.
The new release of SolidWorks eDrawings Professional comes as CAD software vendors from Autodesk to UGS to SolidWorks' parent company Dassault vie to make it easier for knowledge workers in sales, marketing, production, and customer service to share and view engineering documents in familiar file formats such as PDF and Word from their desktops, as well as their ERP systems. This, analysts have said, will enable manufacturing companies to build, market, and deliver products that can be more easily adapted to ever-changing customer requirements, and be serviced more effectively via phone or in person by company or third-party agents.
The new version of SolidWorks eDrawings Professional for the first time gives users the ability to drag and drop eDrawings models directly to Microsoft Office files, including Word and PowerPoint documents. This enables a design engineer, for instance, to pan, zoom, rotate, and animate models, when giving a presentation with PowerPoint. The engineer can't, however, change the model's underlying geometry, noted Fielder Hiss, SolidWorks' manager of product management, in an interview.
In addition, the new version offers publishing/viewing support for AutoCAD 2007 drawings, AutoCAD 3D files, and AutoCAD layers, including the selective activation of layers in a drawing set. Meanwhile, SolidWorks eDrawings Professional also enables users to view, mark up, and measure files created in Google's free SketchUp software, an application for creating 3D conceptual designs. The new version also enables users to apply electronic stamps to eDrawings models to signify they are "approved," "confidential," "draft," or subject to any custom designation, the company said.
Moreover, eDrawings Professional is now bundled with SolidWorks Office Premium 3D CAD software, the company's high-end product that integrates mechanical design, verification, motion simulation, data management, and communication tools in one package. eDrawing Professional has been available as a stand-alone product for the past four years; a basic version is available for free as a download. Roughly one million copies of the free software have been downloaded in the past year, Hiss noted.
One thing SolidWorks does not intend to do with eDrawings Professional is create an on-demand collaborative design environment similar to what CoCreate Software offers with its OneSpace 2006 PLM suite and what Adobe recently announced in Acrobat Connect.
SolidWorks has found that loosely connected product developers and knowledge workers -- separated by time zone and sometimes organizational structure -- are more comfortable using e-mail to share design data and models. "Better or worse, that's the way most people work," Hiss said. "We want to integrate our tools into how people work and think."
Users of eDrawings Professional can also check-in and archive data within SAP or Microsoft Dynamics ERP software, he pointed out. "[Customers] build it into their business process," Hiss said, noting that CAD files from a variety of sources can be converted into a single eDrawing documents that can be shared across functional teams.
Existing SolidWorks Office Premium users on maintenance will receive eDrawings free of charge. Others can license the software for $495 a copy, Hiss said.