While in Boston for PTC Live Global, I had the distinct pleasure of spending an evening at GrabCAD HQ for a small media event. Well, small in terms of the number of attendees but definitely the first of many world changing events that will continue to happen.
GrabCAD has been dominating the CAD industry by integrating its cloud-based PDM system, Workbench, with CAD vendors' design software. The first was Solid Edge, announced at last year's Solid Edge University. Then came a tie in with GrabCAD Workbench and Lagoa cloud rendering, followed by SOLIDWORKS and IronCAD. With each new integration, the developers at GrabCAD improve on the process and, to some extent, the CAD vendors may be a little more open with their API as well. Point being, the integrations with CAD and Workbench are getting more seamless. And that trend stays true with the latest announcement, integration with PTC Creo.
GrabCAD Workbench Integration with PTC Creo
"Thousands of PTC Creo users already rely on Workbench to manage and share CAD files, but shortly they will have access to additional capabilities available only to PTC Creo users, including:
- Viewing native models.
- Viewing Creo drawings and other proprietary Creo documents.
- Interacting with assembly information like family table instances.
In addition, the processing power for all of the above actions will be provided by the GrabCAD cloud platform, freeing up the user’s desktop for other tasks."
These updates will roll out begining in July over the course of the next several months.
In addition to the Creo integration announcement, GrabCAD will be releasing a general update to Workbench on or around July 1st. Several enhancements are planned.
GrabCAD Workbench Update
New capabilities include:
- Flexible search capabilities Search on metadata such as date, type, author, revision, version, and custom file properties.
- “Whereused” reports Shows where a part is used in other assemblies.
- Assembly BOM Views Display, filter, and export the parts list of any CAD assembly.
- Configuration and family table support View different configurations and family members of parts and assemblies from major CAD systems.
Enhancement to existing CAD integrations:
- SolidWorks ® Intelligent notifications alert users of document changes such as when a file is locked or affected by changes to another document.
- Creo ® Automatically detects the latest Creo file for upload; view native parts, assemblies, and drawings.
- Autodesk Support for 3D DWG.
Conclusion:
GrabCAD is not stopping at being an online CAD library or community. It clearly is moving into a position of dominance in the industry -- do I dare say the world with offices in the US, UK and Estonia -- as it continues to expand its tools and gain tighter integrations with CAD software. Maybe cloud-based PDM is the answer to the multi-CAD problem.