He who controls the information, controls the world.
Just ask any secret government agency and they'll verify that statement. But GrabCAD isn't interested in controlling the world, they are interested in DOMINATING IT!
Today marks the culmination of many preceding events, user feedback, and general industry progression that will, no doubt, continue to expand. Today, GrabCAD announces a Collaborative Product Development (CPD) platform within Workbench.
I know what your asking. Hasn't CPD been tried before with little success? In a way, yes it has. But with today's infinite compute power of the cloud while data sharing and collaboration requirements with a single master data file remain the same, it's time to re-envision some old concepts and apply them using the latest technology.
Instead of emailing copies of files to design teams, suppliers, and customers - which makes multiple copies of the same file - share them instead. This new addition to GrabCAD Workbench installs a very lightweight client on host computers which synchronizes data between the client and the server. In other terms, between a local cache and the cloud. And, you can set it up within 3 minutes. Can you do that with your bloated PLM software?
This is not a full lifecycle system. This is a simple collaborative product data manager that solves a very real problem for design teams. CPD in GrabCAD Workbench allows users to
- maintain a single master file,
- create local cache copies of that file for editing,
- lock/check-out the file to prevent multiple edits,
- synchronize the cache copy with the cloud-based master on demand or on a schedule,
- maintain and restore back-up versions, and
- do it all for as little as $25/month/user (the basic paid tier of Workbench subscription).
This may be simple file management for now, but I expect its functionality to continue to dominate.