IronCAD, a leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced the release of its 2015 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite (DCS). Customers will benefit from an improved user experience, enhanced design capabilities and new collaboration tools.
Simplifying the user experience is a key objective for the IronCAD development team and the 2015 release delivered upon this by extending its Configuration Based Design capabilities such as its unique catalog interface.
IronCAD DCS catalogs allow design elements to be stored as basic elements or intelligent elements and then dragged & dropped onto any new object. With the added intelligence, components can automatically configure position, orientation, size, and can give access to business information such as quoting, procurement and more.
Extending upon the catalogs, IronCAD DCS 2015 adds the ability to create catalog groups, which makes it even simpler to organize data and find the best fitting element. Additional intelligence is accessible to automatically constrain elements for not only fit but for function when used in mechanisms.
Beyond the core configuration based design improvements, IronCAD DCS 2015 developed better memory management which improved performance with large data files by up to 20 per cent.
To further enhance verification during the design process, IronCAD DCS 2015 has integrated Multi-Physics (Multi-Physics for IronCAD), a general-purpose solution for modeling and simulating physics-based problems. Also new is a 3D Annotation framework that is the basis for PMI (Product Manufacturing Information). Leveraging its existing industry standard annotation capabilities, users will now have the ability to create 3D annotations such as weld, datum, surface finish, notes, and standard dimensions stored in user-set viewing planes for easy visibility within the 3D scene.
In addition to the many IRONCAD standard improvements, this release focuses on tighter connections to 3rd party programs that help expand the Configuration Based Design capabilities both within an enterprise and extending outside to companies consumers and suppliers. Such improvements include support for KeyShot 5 giving users access to the latest improvements and rendering capabilities to create visuals that can be used for quoting, marketing and product documentation. Connections to Sketchfab and GrabCAD extend online accessibility to collaborative content.
IronCAD’s commitment to sharing design content throughout the supply chain and the extended global team has fueled the creation of more powerful collaboration tools. Capabilities such as SmartMarkup and the new COMPOSE iOS app allows users to import, export, view and collaborate with extended teams to speed up the development process. The IronCAD DCS allows users to share, in a secure way, design data on applications with different levels of access and usability. The ability to automatically connect to the source product data allows IronCAD DCS designers to quickly see optimized design configurations and preview downstream change requests. Designers can then accept, reject or further optimize design changes directly to speed product designs into production
Cary O’Connor, Vice President of Marketing at IronCAD, said: ‘The extension of our Configuration Based Design with our new 2015 release definitely enhances our customer experience and efficiency. These core design tools facilitate quick design, sharing, reuse and accessibility among different user levels across business processes.’
Cary added ‘Furthermore, our customers will benefit from IronCAD DCS 2015 collaboration tools such as Smart eMarkup especially on mobile devices like the iPad. The improvements in the catalogs as well as the advances in communication allows our customers to deliver the highest quality designs faster than ever before possible.’
