Few weeks ago I posted a story about cloud CAD and Dropbox Infinite Project. Apparently it was not only me thinking about how Dropbox can facilitate cloud CAD collaboration. Engineers from SolidEdge thought that it will be a good idea too. The news came yesterday from Siemens PLM and SolidEdge team. SolidEdge ST9 added cloud-enabled file vaulting and scalable built-in data management functions. You can find press release here.
I had a chance to attend SolidEdge ST9 presentation at Siemens PLM Connection conference in Orlando yesterday. The presentation was done by John Miller, Dan Staple of Siemens PLM and David Stafford, head of enterprise solutions for Dropbox.
Cloud-enablement
SolidEdge decided to bring cloud option to users. To make it happen, SolidEdge is partnering with Dropbox to enable file sharing and collaboration function. It is a very interesting technological decision – you might remember some of my earlier thoughts about it here.
In addition to that SolidEdge is adding cloud functions to manage customer accounts, licenses and personalized settings. Overall, you should expect to work with installed SolidEdge on any computer and share your environment and files in a seamless way.
Embedded PDM
SolidEdge is bringing a completely new built-in data management function. It is integrated into file explorer and provides new basic revision management, search and query functions. This functional set is probably standard these days among all CAD vendors. You can find such functionality for Autodesk Inventor, Solidworks and now it became available for SolidEdge.
Teamcenter extension
For those users interesting to in advanced PLM function, SolidEdge is making Teamcenter Active Workspace function embedded into SolidEdge.
What is my conclusion? Companies are more distributed these days. Demand for collaboration and distributed design is growing. SolidEdge is responding to the demand by adding an interesting mix of data management, cloud technologies and integrations to SolidEdge product. It will be interesting to see how customers will adopt Dropbox based vaulting and collaboration for SolidEdge. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain.
