nothingbut net.(Product Announcement)

Distribute designs for flexibility and integration

As the web filters its way Into every aspect of the business world, designers are heading online to find the freshest specs, share the latest data, and preview the coolest software. Network-enabled design tools promise new techniques to boost efficiency and minimize the time between design and deployment.

Publishing reports is one of the easiest and most common ways to use the Internet to facilitate an engineering project. So, taking static Web pages to the next level of interactivity is the concept behind VisMockUp from Engineering Animation, Inc. (EAI) (www.e-vis.com). Designed specifically for 2D and 3D images, this program allows users to view, measure, analyze, mark-up, annotate, and share graphical data online. Similarly, Cadence (www.cadence.com) has announced Internet Engineer, an online environment that facilitates component information retrieval, design management, multi-site design-team coordination, and PCB intellectual property reuse.

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Such programs translate raw data into "business intelligence." In an unprecedented drive towards enterprise integration, corporate decision-makers have started to peer into the firm's databases to glean insights for competitive strategies. That concept is even finding favor among technologists as increasing numbers of engineering managers begin to examine years of test data to pick out trends that may prove valuable, not just for design teams but, for marketing and management strategists as well.

With huge volumes of data being shared by many different people for different purposes, the Internet is transforming into a corporate repository of knowledge that can be accessed and manipulated in a variety of ways. Vuent (www.vuent.com) introduced Envision-i last November as the first real-time, visual collaboration platform designed to support multiple users simultaneously over the Web. Using Envision-i, users in different physical locations can view, interrogate, and re-purpose multiple streams of online data that may even have been authored in different formats.

However, concerns about online data security leave many companies uneasy about exposing their data sets beyond the protective veil of the corporate firewall. Informative Graphics (www.infograph.com) acknowledges that concern and designed its Java-based 2D collaboration Brava server to process engineering documents on the host computer and transmit only compressed display lists of the original files through the company's Web server.