CoCreate (Americas) Users Conference Report

By Darren Litherland

Upon my return from this years CoCreate Americas Users Conference, I was browsing my way around the CoCreate web site and found to my astonishment a link to the (UK) "HP CAD User Group". Having not had any contact for 3-4 years I have often wondered what had happened to the group. I was pleased to see that the "President" was Tim Sharp who I had met at the InterCAD conference in 1993 held in Birmingham. I was surprised that he remembered me, but he did. He remembers me "astounding" everyone with my use of fonts!

Hearing that I had attended this years American conference Tim invited me to give a report.

Here it is.

This year's conference was held in the popular ski resort of Keystone, Colorado. High up in the Rockies about 100 miles from Denver it was the perfect place for a conference. The climate was ideal - rain! Just like at home. The bad weather meant that my wife was quite happy attending the conference and not just spending all our money in the shops.

The program was spread over 4 days late Sunday - early Thursday. The first two days were dedicated to PDM (WorkManager) and the last two CAD. An excellent Product Fair including all the main American VARs, CoCreate Customer Support, HP, SGI, Spicer etc. was the venue for the cocktail parties and meals. The hands-on sessions with WorkManager and SolidDesigner laid on by CoCreate were very popular. Here's a day-by-day account:

Sunday: (mmmmmm, was this such a good idea?)

19 hours of travel (tourist class), air-sickness, queues in immigration, 7 hours of jet-lag, altitude-sickness, queues in reception, cocktail-party? (We didn't bother!)

Monday: (sleep walking….)

With the CAD delegates not due until the third day I started of feeling al little out of place and rather tired. My knowledge of WorkManager is limited and all the other delegates were real experts. It was during the PDM sessions I met Martin Miles from Definitive. It was good to have someone to help me during my pathetic attempts at creating WorkFlow routines. Thanks Martin.

The PDM sessions were dominated by two main topics: Web and implementation. Any Brits thinking of implementing WM would be well advised to contact the presenters of these papers. The level at which some of these guys work is probably beyond that attainable by any mortal engineer.

Tuesday: (back to normality)

The filling in the conference sandwich was the keynote speaker and business updates direct from CoCreate.

Dave Burdick from Gartner Group lead the way by confessing that only a couple of years ago his company had little positive to say about the future of "CoCreate"! He admitted that the tune has changed now and Gartner Group considered CoCreate and its products as amongst the most visionary. I'm sure many of us feel the same way. It is clear CoCreate have done a lot of hard work the last 2 years or so. Tilman Schad seemed to like what he heard anyway. The various Business Managers did their stuff presenting the latest versions of their products. Tim has previously illustrated all the new features so I won't dwell on this aspect. The most interesting thing to hear was how CoCreate is positioning ME10 as a design tool at the side of SolidDesigner. During the round table event Uli Mahle (SD) and Wolfgang Stanik (ME10) explained to a very inquisitive audience that ME10 will not be replaced by the annotator. ME10 will be continued as a 2D DESIGN tool. The annotation module within SolidDesigner is intended for drawing generation. Good news for many.

Other good news to be announced was the establishment of a council of users. This council would be key to future enhancements. It would consist of ME10 users from companies representing different fields and magnitudes. I guess it will be a lottery as to who will be chosen…….

My presentation was sadly the victim of the "SolidDesigner New Features Hands-on Session"! So the less said about that here the better. Perhaps some other time. (It was all about a password system I've developed.)

The conference dinner involved taking a ski-lift to an altitude of 14.000 feet. We had to prepare for bad weather as last year it snowed! Unfortunately it didn't this year, but we had a great time even so. The fondue-dinner was followed by a stand-up comic. A little bit of advice: don't confess to being English to an American stand-up comic.

When it came to the CAD sessions I felt much better. Here was something I thought I knew something about. Mistaken again. Having two products to deal with, SD and ME10 the sessions were somewhat polarised. I wish I had a dual or even triple personality which allowed me to attend all the superb sessions run in parallel. It was such a shame to miss presentations on the subject of for example "Integrating CoCreate with Microsoft Applications". when the parallel session was "Customisation and configuration of SolidDesigner Annotation". I mean how on earth are you to choose? Several companies had two or three delegates attending and that was very wise.

The day's lunch was combined with the user group's AGM. The web site was formerly launched (see above) and the results of the macro competition were announced. The macro library chairman had told me beforehand to listen carefully to what the prizes would be next year. This made me wonder. I listened carefully and it was announced that ME10, SD and WM licenses would be the prizes next year (two for each category). This year the prize was $100! I then discovered why I was told about next year - I had won the ME10 competition! My little "ASSEMBLY_DETAIL" macro had done the trick. The macros in the competition can be found on the web site.

Of the SolidDesigner sessions I attended the most interesting dealt with "Attaching Design Information to Solid Models". This looks very promising allowing the designer to communicate his ideas to other users and applications within the single model. We saw how SolidDesigner could be informed on what could or could not be allowed. "Watch this space" as they say.

I attended the hands-on session for SolidDesigner interface customisation. I didn't realise how easy it is to do! This is the sort of thing you need. You find out all sorts of things to do within your capabilities - and end up saving thousands of pounds in improved design efficiency.

Thursday: (this is great….)

Besides Steve Montambaults "ACE" presentaion we had the chance of asking CoCreate engineers about problems we had with the products and get advice.

Some of the problems seemed to me to be rather absurd. One problem that took a lot of discussion time was the "decimal point" in plots and plotting from Windows in general. Obviously, CoCreate must do something about the training of users in solving "small faults" themselves. CoCreate must also do something about Windows plotting if NT is going to replace UNIX as the main platform in large companies.

The best thing about the last day was that everyone wanted to see my macros. One ME10 user even commented that it wasn't fair that my company is the only one to have my GD&T system! This was one of the best days of my life.

Having experienced 6 earlier "HP" CAD conferences I would rate this years American event as the best ever. Well attended by both customers and vendors it was well worth the long journey. In the future, I hope the PDM and CAD programmes can be held entirely in parallel to prevent collision of key sessions. If CoCreate or a user group can't organise a conference in Europe next year then I will definitely go transatlantic again.

Finally, I would like to give some advice to all the ME10/30/SolidDesigner users who are under pressure from other suppliers. You may be happy with the CAD system you have but are not quite convinced that it's the right system. Everyone else seems to be buying ProE or AutoCAD. It just happens that "everyone else" are those people you know of. But, what about those you don't know? Thousands of companies out there are doing amazing things with SolidDesigner, ME10 and Workmanager. Get out and meet them. Talk to them. Find out how they make things work. Find out who does their customisation. Then you may just discover that "everyone else" is getting the job done with CoCreate!

(And if you go to the American conference - let me know.)

PS. Thanks to all the VARs, CoCreate, HP, SGI etc. for the great T-shirts, bags, key-rings, CDs, cuddly-toy