Editor’s Pick: Content Creation, Delivery, and Collaboration Enhanced

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

I am a lot of things: Incredibly macho male, uncle,  dyspeptic colleague, come to mind. But, in the end, I am a content guy. I love creating and delivering content. I love communicating with you through these messages and the articles and commentaries that I write or edit. I love collaborating with authors, colleagues, designers, and editors to create great content. It’s this love of creating, collaborating on, and delivering content that drew me today’s Pick of the Week selection, the latest release of 3DVIA Composer from Dassault.

Romantically tagged with V6R2010x as this new revision’s last name, 3DVIA Composer is a toolset for the individual, workgroup, or enterprise to communicate and collaborate. And not everyone has to be an engineer to use it. In fact, you don’t have to be an engineer at all, which is a attribute that should attract a lot of attention from all of you who waste untold amounts of patience trying to show sales, marketing, PR, and, well,  certain managers what it is that you do for a living.

Essentially what 3DVIA Composer does is it lets you take CAD data and create 2D and 3D documents: animations, assembly instructions,  illustrations, training stuff, and what have you. It’s designed with an interface that is easy to use and as automatic and tailorable to your needs as possible. The idea is to get people communicating and collaborating with the bare minimum of step-up, training, and file fiddling so that everyone can focus on the job at hand and not 3DVIA Composer.

The cool part to the way 3DVIA does business is that all you have to do is equip your extended enterprise co-workers with the free, quick and easy to download 3DVIA Player and you’re in the collaboration and communication business. The people you work with can take a model pan and zoom,  rotate it, and so forth.

I downloaded the free player and a couple of models before writing this. The minute download took longer than it took to get the hang of 3DVIA Player. Actually, there was no getting the hang of it. I just used it right away. You’ll find a link to 3DVIA Player and some models to play with dangling off today’s write-up. Try it yourself. You’ll just use it too. If someone can’t handle it or figure out what you’re working on after using 3DVIA Player, they have problems.

Anyway, 3DVIA Composer is, of course, more than a tool to interact with a bunch of images. It’s a robust, flexible toolset for making communications and collaboration easier, better, and sane. It’s a product that brings all of us a big step closer to the promise of product lifecycle management for the everyone in the enterprise. There’s a ton of extra information for you hanging off today’s write-up. Go for it. Take the time to get to know 3DVIA Composer.

Thanks, Pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s Pick of the Week.