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Brian Schanen joined Autodesk in 2005 as a Product Designer and currently is a Customer Success Engineer for Autodesk’s Data Management products. Brian has taught at Autodesk University numerous times and has authored white papers on Vault and Productstream. He works with customers to implement a complete digital prototyping solution specializing in Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Vault and Productstream. Brian lives near Detroit, Michigan.
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Welcome Brian!
May 30, 2006 03:15 PMby Grant RochelleSome great news to share today. Later this week Brian Roepke will be joining me as co-conspirator and fellow blogger here at Under The Hood. Many of you already know Brian, who has been working here at Autodesk for about 3 years. Brian will bring a big bucket o' experience with him, having started his own data management company, written a software product, got himself acquired and served as Product Manager until just recently when he took on the role of Product Design Manager for our product line.
Congrats to Brian and look out for a more detailed bio and Brian's first postings soon.
As an aside, many of you heard about Carl Bass taking on the job of CEO at Autodesk this month. Carl is a very personable guy, and if you don't believe me you should read this article published recently by the Marin Independent Journal. It'll give you a good bit of insight into who's at the helm these days. Enjoy!
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How do you work with drawings?
May 23, 2006 09:33 AMby Grant RochelleToday I want to ask for your help. We're conducting research to help with future product direction and I am really interested to get your feedback on how you work with drawings today. I've designed a very short, 5 question survey using Survey Monkey (fabulous tool by the way) to help me understand how 2D fits into your design process. The survey is completely anonymous and I promise faithfully that you will not get harassed by any kind of sales and marketing follow-up.
If you've got literally 1 minute to spare today, please click on the link below and complete the 5 questions:
Working With Drawings Survey
Thanks!
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Options anyone?
May 22, 2006 10:19 AMby Grant RochelleAfter our quarter end results were announced, there has been a flurry of activity in the online financial community; guidance raised, prices drop, revenues up, profits down. All of this accompanies by the usual cacophony of recommendations to buy, sell, hold or chuck 'em all on 18 red and let 'er spin. I must admit I gave up on trying to understand the market quite some time ago (round about the time I listened to a "golden" recommendation to buy into Global Crossing as the next big thing and lost my shorts in even shorter order), but I found the exchange of views and comments related to "insider trading" on CAD Insider very amusing. I wonder if people who feel so strongly about the evil practices of employee stock purchase plans and stock option grants would feel quite so strongly if they worked there and counted on them as part of their benefit package? Just curious...
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The right stuff
May 12, 2006 08:02 AMby Grant RochelleI mentioned in a previous entry the great work that Scott McEachronwas doing to educate our Civil 3D friends about Vault. Scott has now munged all his content together in a single post to make it easier to digest. Reading his article reminded me just how important it is to start your implementation off the right way and consider things like:
- what kind of hardware and operating system do I need?
- where do I locate the Vault file store?
- how do I handle database maintenance, backup and restore?
In the new release we have made availbale a fab new guidebook that answers all these questions and more. It's called the Implementation Guide for Autodesk Data Management Server 5. So download a copy, pour yourself a cuppa, get your feet up on the poofy and read on. It's time well spent - trust me.
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Four little questions
May 11, 2006 04:42 PMby Grant RochelleIf you've ever sat back and wondered what it takes to be successful with all these magnificent software tools we have at our disposal in the world of engineering design, you might want to take a look at this article. It doesn't really matter if you're currently pondering how to get started or if you're part way into implementation, the four little questions that Bill Koch, Editor of Product Lifecycle Management Digest poses and answers with the help of my boss can be very useful.
Take a gander.
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Solidworks finally offers mash and beans!
May 5, 2006 04:24 PMby Grant RochelleFINALLY! It's been a source of some curiosity for me why Solidworks has not stepped up to the plate to offer a complete solution to it's customers that includes data management. For such a large PLM player not to have DM on tap is a bit like a nice, posh restaurant serving fab steaks but having to sub contract the mash and green beans to the Boston Market next door. Best-in-class might work well for other add on applications to CAD such as CAM, but when it comes to data management savvy customers are usually leery of third party products to take care of their core intellectual property.
So the big news now is that SolidWorks has aquired GCS Scandanavia, makers of Conisio (a Gold Certified Partner product). Presumably they will deep six PDMWorks and strengthen the integration into SolidWorks, probably at the sacrifice of the other CAD products that Conisio used to support, including Inventor and AutoCAD. It will be interesting to see this unfold, as it usually takes a while to digest an acquisition and figure out all the details.
If I might be excused for a brief moment of unashamed chest beating however, I firmly believe this move is in direct response to the incredible momentum we are seeing behind Vault and Productstream here at Autodesk. SolidWorks was at a clear disadvantage and our unique strategy has prompted a reaction. Incidentally, this is the first acquisition that Dassault has made on behalf of SolidWorks in a long, long while.
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Vault with Civil 3D
May 3, 2006 05:28 PMby Grant RochelleI'm back! After several days punching it out with tilers and plumbers over the 2 disastrous leaks in both bloody bathrooms I am finally calm enough to do something with my hands other than wring them or shake them in frustration. Is it just me, or is every contractor in the world just, well, difficult to deal with?
Speaking of difficult to deal with, working with Civil 3D data just got _way_ easier since my friends over at ISD have launched Vault for Civil 3D users. This is great news for their customers, who now have the choice to use Vault for their data management needs. During our recent product launches for resellers the ISD team included extensive classroom instruction to the Americas applications engineers, and I just found this posting on Scott McEachron's blog which you should check out if you're interested in finding out more. Vault is also available for other products, and I'll write up a bit more on that later.