CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
8 January 2009
Events News
CONTACT Software Presents Preview of CIM DATABASE 2.9.8
CONTACT’s Technology Day held at year-end was dominated by the imminent release of CIM DATABASE version 2.9.8. Many customers accepted the invitation to Munich to inform themselves in workshops and “live” online of the numerous new functions of this latest release. Special acclaim was awarded to the innovations Workspaces, PowerReports and Enterprise Search. These novel CIM DATABASE platform modules provide users with even more functionality, flexibility and benefit for CAD and product data management.
Based on the concept of shared workspaces, CONTACT implemented a totally new principle in CAD data management. Users for the first time command a universal, dedicated interface to synchronize data and documents of their specific authoring system with the central PDM/PLM data hub. Following the motto „share your ideas“, Workspaces warrant the efficient self-organization of a personal or team-oriented design environment and at the same time ensure the integrity and validity of the accumulated, centralized data. Users individually or as a team organize their work-load of CAD and Office documents, design-space structures etc. and utilize these locally, although regionally or globally distributed. This allows for maximum performance and – upon demand – temporary work off-line and without being connected to the central vault. Consequently, CIM DATABASE Workspaces allow fully new means of integrating partners and sub-contractors right down to the support of federal structures consisting of two or more PLM systems that may be synchronized via Workspaces.
Further highlights of the upcoming version are the new CIM DATABASE PowerReports. They extract their data from re-usable and parametrizable XML data sources that may be configured and released for individual reports of groups or individuals – without any further programming effort from within CIM DATABASE. No matter, whether it is the depiction of a hierarchic BOM for construction or a multi-project-view with concurrent parameters for management purposes: the analysis of PDM object data according to varying criteria is, given the necessary access rights, simply and swiftly done. Special skills are not required as the report compilation is performed within Microsoft’s Excel, thanks to CIM DATABASE’s Office integration support. This includes the use of graphics and diagrams to automatically visualize and present project and product data in an appealing manner.
CIM DATABASE 2.9.8 also sees the release of a new infrastructure for combined full-text and user-defined text retrieval services under the name Enterprise Search. In comparison to the previous system based upon Oracle Text, the new solution is database independent and ten times faster. It allows the search across all PDM database-related object classes such as documents, articles, open issues etc. Both simple and Boolean search runs are supported as well as wildcards, word strings or similar terms (fuzzy search). Results are presented together with the related text and highlighted search criteria. The standard configuration incorporates filters for Microsoft Office including Office 2007, txt- and RTF files, Outlook and all mail applications based on RFC822 such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Zip, PDF and, of course, XML, and therefore covers the most commonly used file formats. Upon customer request, any other random filters may be integrated. The new Enterprise Search technology maintains its speed when indexing documents at a rate of 5250 per hour – nothing spectacular in day-to-day operations, but significant when migration of large data volume from obsolete systems is demanded.
Feed-back on the new version from Technology Day participants was clear: The improvements and innovations made available with release 2.9.8 were explicitly well received. “One notices that CIM DATABASE is undergoing continued development and that user requests are answered to. CONTACT is reputed for the fact”, states Friedhelm Steup, head of IT with security specialist ABUS. And Jörg Weyel, project manager PDM/PLM with the automotive supplier Thomas Magnete, believes that “CONTACT’s credo ‚ideas to innovations’ will continue to generate the decisive added-value in the future”.
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