Doug Halliday at Adobe PLM

What is New at Adobe?

So, you may be asking yourself, where has Doug been?  He hasn’t posted anything in a while.  Well, I really have something to write about now.  A week ago, Adobe announced Acrobat V9.  The announcement includes Acrobat Pro Extended, which has had many industry analysts speculating about what Adobe was up to in manufacturing.  Acrobat V9 comes in three flavors, Standard, Pro and Pro Extended.  Acrobat Pro Extended is the new “home” for 3D PDFs created on the desktop.  We also announced Livecycle PDFG 3D last week, a server based solution for batch generation of PDFs with 3D content.  I am going to concentrate this article and several that will follow to some of the new features of these two essential manufacturing products.  Today I’ll concentrate just on Acrobat Pro Extended.

Continue reading "What's in a Name?" »

Posted by Doug Halliday at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Automotive industry is making some remarkable progress in PLM.  I recently participated in AUTOe, a mostly automotive PLM conference at Oakland University in suburban Detroit.  Progress in adopting 3D Model-Based Engineering has been so strong that the industry is taking the next steps.  The overriding theme of the conference was collaboration, which was broadly defined to include all of the various forms of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.  I recorded a number of things that I would like to share.  Please read on to learn about my observations.

Continue reading "Auto Industry Collaboration Leadership" »

Posted by Doug Halliday at 07:53 AM | Permalink

Some time ago I posted an article about what I see as the 2D to 3D trend.  Will we continue to see movement to 3D or will that progress somehow plateau?  The major point of that article was that not everything is or needs to be 3D-based and the best companies are learning to blend the two effectively.   There is no doubt that 3D content will continue to grow.  There are technical challenges, process challenges and, most importantly, people challenges.   I read an interesting article recently by Robert Green in cadalyst entitled “The Realists Guide to 3D Implementation, Part 1”.  The article is on the mark in my opinion.   

I would like to jump off from Robert’s article to offer offer my thoughts on how companies like Adobe are helping with that transition.

Read on…

Continue reading "Pitfalls Along the Road to Becoming a 3D Enterprise" »

Posted by Doug Halliday at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I have been writing in this Blog about how Adobe can help all manufacturing companies extend their engineering information across and outside the enterprise.  Our LiveCycle enterprise solutions, Acrobat clients and Connect synchronous and asynchronous tools are all aimed at both managing workflows and extending them.  The reach provided by the ubiquity and rich functionality of Adobe’s cross-platform, run time clients, the free Adobe Reader and Flash are unlocked by our solutions.  Data collection, collaboration, review and comment cycles and of course the ability to share information anywhere was the message I was trying to convey with this picture in a recent article.   Of course, the workflows could be simple ad hoc collaboration or managed workflows.

So along comes Rak Bhalla from Marketing and says “Doug, that’s fine, but can you show me an example?”  I wrote another article I called Extending CAD outside Engineering showing how to combine 2D and 3D content and make them available broadly.  Well, still not satisfied Rak asked if I would do a “Breezo”.  Well, I did.  Read on to find out what a “Breezo” is and to view what I did.

Continue reading "A Star is Born (Not)" »

Posted by Doug Halliday at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Structured Workflows to the Rescue?

I read a study recently about business process trends that said manufacturing companies are increasing the number of structured workflows (in comparison to ad hoc) to streamline operations.  Hum?  So that must mean that business process management being implemented at enterprise levels is swinging the pendulum from informal to formal processes.  I suppose that means enterprise solutions are in and simpler, client-based solutions are out.   I don’t believe it.   Here’s why.

Continue reading "Have You Been Invited to the Spring Formal?" »

Posted by Doug Halliday at 07:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)