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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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DWF Extension available
June 19, 2006 06:11 PMby Grant RochelleHey - I'm back! And with good news too (for a change?). As you may or may not know, our good friends over at Autodesk Collaboration Services have released new flavours of both DWF Viewer and Design Review (a.k.a. DWF Composer). Now, if you're using either of these products by themselves you are ready to rock and roll; just go and download DWF Viewer 7.0 from here, and if you've already purchased DWF Composer you can get your product update by contacting your reseller or Autodesk sales representative.
If you're an Inventor user, you will need to get hold of something called the Autodesk Inventor 11 DWF Extension in order to take advantage of all the cool new features such as round trip markup and publishing your Inventor parts list into DWF. You can get the Inventor 11 DWF Extension from here, but note that you will need to be on subscription to get the goodies.
And most importantly of all, if you're using Vault 5 or Productstream 5 you need the Hotfix: DWF Extension for Autodesk Design Review 2007 and DWF Viewer . This hotfix enables Vault 5 and Productstream 5 clients to view DWF files generated from Autodesk Design Reviewer 2007 within Vault Explorer or any of the Productstream clients. IMPORTANT to remember though, this hotfix does not include Design Reviewer 2007 - you will still need to contact your reseller or Autodesk sales representative to get it.
Happy Viewing!
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Drinkies with small umbrellas
June 14, 2006 04:59 PMby Grant RochelleWell, I tried very hard to resist but here I am making a token contribution. I'm not quite on the beach but I can more or less see it from where I'm sitting. What a fabuluous place! The last time we came to Maui we stayed in Paia, but this time we are down in Kihei. So far things have worked out extremely well, particularly with the weather which could not be any better. I did get a bit of a scare today when I was in the sea with our daughter - the surf was on the "dumping" side (I am referring to some sort of nautical term apparently and not to any kind of bodily function) and unfortunately we got well and truly dumped on. We both disappeared under the wave and it was all I could do to keep hold of poor little Amelia. Still, two years old and she's quite the trooper and shook it off in no time at all. It could take me considerably longer however, at least two more of those magnificient rum drinks with little umbrellas in them anyway :-)
I can see that you've been in very capable hands with Mr. Roepke while I am swanning around in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Enjoy and see you all again next week.
TTFN
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Microsoft Office 2007
June 13, 2006 08:36 AMby Brian RoepkeI've had the absolute unwavering pleasure of running the new MS Office 2007 beta for a while now. I will say one word - Perfect.
That might be a bold statement but I really , really mean it. It is fantastic. Many of you that know me will say that I'm a bit of an MS zealot. However in this case I'm being fairly objective about my feedback.
The new interface is developed around the concept of "ribbon bars". These are by no means a new concept, in fact the first ones that I know of were in Solid Edge and were designed by a good friend of mine that works for Autodesk. These ribbons are based on groupings of common tasks, for example: inserting things, laying out your page, reviewing, etc. The brilliance to me of the design really revolves around "what" exactly was grouped together. This could have gone horribly wrong - almost like one of those really embarrassing moments in a movie where you just have to look away... you know the ones - but it didn't. I can't believe that as I use this software how intuitive it's becoming and how much faster I'm doing things. Here are some highlights for me:
Microsoft Word - I use Word a lot and I use it properly. I'm a religious user of styles and headings to produce an easy to maintain document. In 2007 they put all the styles up front on the first tab along with some other common formatting overrides. To be honest, other than to insert a table or pictures (on the second tab!) I don't really leave "home"!
Microsoft Excel - A brilliant job here of creating a set of new canned formatting tools that allow you to present data better. My favorite new feature is called "Conditional Formatting" - you can do crazy things like the image below. All I had to do was enter numbers and tell it to put those images in the column. A simple graphical way to get a richer spreadsheet without any more work.
Microsoft PowerPoint - The tool I probably use the most. This app was probably updated by wiring directly into my skull. They have created a whole series of ways to format and make your presentation pretty without all the picks-and-clicks that you normally have to do to get borders, text, colors, etc... right. This is truly brilliant!
So, how on Earth did they get it this good? Well, I know the answer. Remember when I said PowerPoint was possible hard-wired to me? It was!
Have you ever seen the "opt in" "Customer Experience Improvement Programs" that Microsoft asks you to participate in? They are a simple yes or no to "would you like to help us make our products better?" question. I've seen them in MS Office and MS Messenger in particular, but I'm sure they are elsewhere. What happened was MS has been collecting data on how people navigate through the software, which functionality is used the most and what paths you take through it. With millions of data points to analyze it must have been clear to them what they needed to streamline - either that or I'm the only one that participated since it works so well for me!
Let this be some food for thought for you as you see these participation questions come up in various software. Your feedback could really help drive a revolutionary change in the way software works!
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Search - It
June 6, 2006 04:02 AMby Brian RoepkeI'm back again with another tip that you might not have stumbled upon yet. This is one of my favorite additions to Vault and Productstream 5; however, it isn't enabled by default.
By now, unless you've been hiding under a rock, you have been aware of the growing usefulness of "search" within our computing environment. Search, as popularized by Google, has literally changed the way we find information. I remember the first time I jumped on the Internet. I was using Internet Explorer version "something really bad" and had no concept of where to start. I went to a search engine and typed in what I was looking for and ended up with nothing more than a bunch of (dare I say) adult oriented web sites... not really what I wanted and definitely not the best experience. However, Google, with the simple yet ingenious idea of ranking search results based on how people moved through the internet and other factors, actually made it practical to get back information you were looking for. I don't know how many times these days that the answer I'm looking for doesn't show up within the first three results! Enter the search revolution.
The next big revolution to come, for me at least, was the entrée of the Desktop Search apps. Microsoft has one, Google has one, 3 million other smaller vendors have one. Clearly people are creating more data and needing better ways to organize than folders. CAD and engineering are no exception here. As designers and engineers, we create possibly more data than any other discipline, especially if you are using Autodesk Inventor!
So what is the problem with these apps and engineering data? Well for starters your engineering data is often not stored on your desktop (nor should it be!) and very few of these tools have the ability to scan network drives. Secondly the file formats we deal with on a day to day basis are specialized and often these off-the-shelf tools don't have the ability to get the right data out of our files. Finally, these tools don't offer the ability to protect our data or do other interesting stuff with it... like rename, copy, etc...
Enter our version - Full Content Search. As advertised this is the ability to search within files to find pretty much any information that you might be looking for. It is built right into Autodesk Vault and Autodesk Productstream and once turned on just simply works -- there is nothing more to do. Here is how you do it.
1. First, launch Vault Manger and log in.
2. Next, right click on the vault you want to "Index" as we say -- and select "Content Indexing Service"
3. Choose the proper option to turn this on and you're done!
You will need to give the server some time to index all the data depending on how many files are already in there -- in some cases you might need to wait overnight the first time...asmall price to pay for this powerful addition.
There are two ways to get "into" the documents when you search. The first is from the "Advanced Find" dialog on the "Basic" tab. Here you'll find a small check box that says "Search File Contents" as an optional setting. Secondly, from the "Quick Find Bar" (press the "Find" button on the Toolbar to access this) you will find options that allow you to do the same.
By default you'll find you will automatically be able to search all sorts of documents, from plain text files to office documents -- you will even be able to search text inside of a DWG!
Full Content Search is a very powerful tool. Knowing you can get all of this information from our search tools, consider what other files you can store along with your CAD data to make better use of your tools -- Use it and love it!
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Defining Custom Views
June 4, 2006 01:43 PMby Brian RoepkeIt's Sunday in Oregon and for some reason the weather can't make up its mind -- rain, sun, rain, sun... Whatever... And as Grant takes off and abandons us all, traipsing to some tropical island he mentioned he'd need a guest author on the blog to do his work! Well -- I guess that is me.
My name is Brian Roepke and I'm (currently) the Product Design Manager for the data management products. We have a team based all around the world with people working on the future of our DM products in Portland, Detroit, Atlanta, Munich and Singapore -- Not bad! These guys are some of the best in the world at what they do and design everything you see and feel when you're using our products. Pretty amazing.
Since I deal with more of the product side of things, I thought I would discuss a tip with you that really helps me out when I use Productstream and the Vault -- "Custom Views". These were introduced in Productstream 4 but are now available in Vault 5 and Productstream 5. They offer a bunch of advantages over any other view customization -- Here we go:
* First off, they are an easy way to create saved views of columns so you can easily switch between different views
* Secondly they are different in the way they retrieve data from the server. In other view customizations they data is "filtered" after it reaches the client. In the case of these custom views they are actually filtered on the server -- This greatly improves performance when it comes to building and displaying a grid of information.
How do you use them? This is pretty simple. There is a new small "Advanced" toolbar that has a dropdown list in it. By default this will only have one view called "All Files" (for folders, but for Items in Productstream it has other pre-built views).
1. First click the drop down in this toolbar and select "Define custom views..."
2. Next, click the new Button and give the view a name like "Thumbnails"
3. Now you have a few things you can play with and tweak to your liking
- Fields -- Pretty self explanatory. What fields do you want to display. For this example, click this button and add the "Thumbnails" field to the list, maybe remove the "Comments" filed too in order to give you some more room.
- Custom Filters -- This is a great tool. It works just like a search but the criteria retuned here will be the only thing that is displayed when you look at the view. Try adding a filter where "File Name -- contains - .ipt"
- Other Settings -- Explore around here -- things like gridlines and other cosmetic settings
- Reset -- In case you want to start over from a base view.
4. After you create your new view simply select it for the folder you want to change... Simple as that!
These views will only apply to a folder at a time. If there is a more generic change you want to make to a view, you can modify the "All Files" view to adjust that to your liking!
As Grant would say -- Cheerio. That is all for now!
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Maui here we come
June 2, 2006 09:44 PMby Grant RochelleWell everybody, it's time for me to say cheerio for a couple of weeks as I head off with my family for a couple of weeks rest in Maui. I have been contemplating how much you might appreciate me blogging whilst sitting on a beach with several umbrella drinks sloshing around in me, and I am torn. I would hate to rub it in especially if you're grafting away while I've got my toes in warm, crystal clear water. But then again, it could be fun!
So, if I can find an internet cafe periodically I will try my best to keep you up to date. I don't anticipate having to find a new best friend like I did in Seoul, the food in Maui tends to be a lot gentler on the stomach. But I'm sure there will be some worthwhile anecdotes. Look out for Brian to appear on the scene in my absence, and Mahalo!