Your Inventor File Wants to Vuuch You

What would it be like if your Inventor file suddenly becomes a person with a Facebook profile? You can then track its manufacturing status (in progress, in revision, released to production), much in the same way you might track a friend’s relationship status (single, married to, in a relationship, complicated, etc.). If you want other people with shared interest in the part to collaborate with you, you might suggest they too become the file’s friends. You might scribble notes on the file’s wall (“I’m changing its thickness to 0.5 mm. Let me know if it can still be machined.”) to alert everyone associated with the file of your changes. You might post markups as JPEGs to the file’s wall to discuss issues. If you feel you’ve contributed all that you should and you no longer care about the file, you can disconnect from its home page, just as you might de-friend someone on Facebook (it’s a drastic step to take for online friends, but it is available on Facebook).

Vuuch, a plug-in described as “Facebook for Files,” is available for for Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, and MS Office files. Last week, the company released a version for Autodesk Inventor. Vuuch for Inventor premiered with some limitations: It’s available in only 32-bit code; it’s not fully embedded into Inventor’s menu bar, the right-click menu, and the history tree (it appears as a separate floating palette). Whereas Vuuch for Pro/E and SolidWorks let you start a discussion on specific features (such as bosses, holes, and blends), Vuuch for Inventor lets you launch a discussion only at part level. (As a workaround, you can start the discussion thread at part level, but point your collaborators towards the feature in question with markups and annotations.) According to Vuuch’s founder and CEO Chris Williams, the next release will address these and make the plug-in much more integrated with Inventor.

With Vuuch, once you initiate a discussion on a part, a home page for the part is automatically created on Vuuch’s server. You and your collaborators can send updates and shout outs from this page (like sending Tweets to all followers of the part), accessible only to those associated with the part and the discussion. But if you’d rather not bother with the dedicated home page for the part, you can reply to Vuuch messages via email; you don’t have to log into the Vuuch server to participate.

Vuuch plug-ins are free at the moment, so you can download and try out one that works with your CAD platform. Vuuch for PDF is currently in development. Vuuch is a forerunner of a new crop of collaboration tools modeled on social media, poised to serve the generation of engineers, designers, and project managers who grow up on Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook for Files, as it turns out, doesn’t yet have a Facebook page. So, while I’m testing out Vuuch, I sent Vuuch’s CEO and founder Chris Williams a message from the Vuuch portal: “How about creating a Facebook fan page for Vuuch?” In Chris’ words, you might say I Vuuched him.

For a video demonstration of Vuuch, watch the clip below: