Concrete & Steel

[digitalcarbon]

So...after my smug "confidence is high" post above...i woke up in the middle of the night with the thought "what if they go bankrupt and close down!...what's going to happen to all my stuff!!"

 

so now i have cold feet...

 

 

[zoomer]

14 hours ago, digitalcarbon said:

i just sent an email saying "its there" for review & comment

 

So you can sign me up for VW cloud

 

 

What about, at current state of VW,

using a VW file with dropbox,

in Project Sharing mode for collaboration with your coworkers and

VW Viewer (*) for your clients for supervising  ?

 

(*) to avoid PDF and Bluebeam ...

[zoomer]

Maybe this is interesting for your kind of usage ?

 

 

[Christiaan]

On 28/10/2017 at 0:42 PM, digitalcarbon said:

So...after my smug "confidence is high" post above...i woke up in the middle of the night with the thought "what if they go bankrupt and close down!...what's going to happen to all my stuff!!"

 

That's what I thought when Artv said "As far as I know you have to put all data in Onshape and you can't get it out in an editable way as you can in Onshape itself." Although you're pretty much in that position if VW goes bankrupt at least you have a desktop app to keep you going. 

 

Onshape could solve this by providing a self-hosting version of Onshape, that you can host on your own server. Might be a route towards providing a more secure CAD environment when needed too.

Edited October 30, 2017 by Christiaan

[digitalcarbon]

So i was thinking that if VW went out of business then you could still survive for a time and then the time would come to export your stuff into the new cad system that you would end up getting...

 

so if Onshape went out of business then they could have a batch download of all your models and you just move on with another cad system...

(i can sort of do that now)

 

the more likely scenario is a person switches cad systems for whatever reason...have not some people that had VW left and switched to some other cad system?

 

so basically they face the obstacles mentioned above and have survived...with that said I'm not as worried now about "my stuff" if the company goes belly up.

 

on to other points...

 

any comments that it did not crash in the 51hrs that i used it?

or 

that it was so simple that i got my wife to set up sheets & BOM? 

 

 

 

[digitalcarbon]

Zoomer, the CADWorx is cool but likely only piping.. the stuff i do, while has piping, it not really out of the box stuff... they sometimes ask me to take some pipe and make it into something that is not really pipe but pipe like...

 

also need DTM ability.

 

I'm finding VW so versatile that i can do just about anything...Landscaping, making graph paper (see below), making a nuclear reactor & oh...making buildings...

 

 

[digitalcarbon]

ok now back to cloud collaboration...I'm in VW now and have project sharing set up...now every time i do something is says i need to "check this out"  or if i save i need to "save & commit"  

 AND I'M ONLY 15 MIN INTO USING VW WITH PROJECT SHARING  what a difference from the 51hrs i spent in Onshape working in a collabritive way...

 

you have GOT to be kidding me!!  

[zoomer]

1 hour ago, digitalcarbon said:

Zoomer, the CADWorx is cool but likely only piping.. the stuff i do, while has piping, it not really out of the box stuff...

 

Yes, but the B-things has mechanical abilities and all standard 3D Solid Modeling.

I think there are plugins too for GIS or DTM but I think most serious Plugins are Windows only.

 

But you have VW now and do astonishing things with it.

Project Sharing seems to still cause many problems as I read on the forum. And I think,

like everything in VW, you have to get used to it, to get experienced what is a save way to

use it and all what to avoid to not run into problems and one way streets.

[Art V]

9 hours ago, digitalcarbon said:

Zoomer, the CADWorx is cool but likely only piping..

 

Not really, Intergraph (or Hexagon PPM as it now called) has two major software packages for plant design, SmartPlant for greenfield (i.e. new) projects and CADWorx for brownfield (i.e. existing build) projects. CADWorx can also do structures, equipment like pumps, vessels, reactors etc. and generate isometrics, so it is not only piping, though piping is probably the bulk of items (number of components wise) in a plant.

[Art V]

10 hours ago, Christiaan said:

 

That's what I thought when Artv said "As far as I know you have to put all data in Onshape and you can't get it out in an editable way as you can in Onshape itself." Although you're pretty much in that position if VW goes bankrupt at least you have a desktop app to keep you going. 

 

Onshape could solve this by providing a self-hosting version of Onshape, that you can host on your own server. Might be a route towards providing a more secure CAD environment when needed too.

Well... the nasty detail is called "activation checking" If online activation an checking is used and the software manufacturer goes bankrupt then the activation/license server will probably go down as well. So if  you need to connect to the license server at least once every 30 days then you you have 30 days maximum to convert your files into another format before the software stops working.

 

If Onshape goest bankrupt overnight then you lose everything unless you made "backups" in a less smart format (compared to Onshape). This is probably not a practical thing for live projects, but it is an option for finished projects or completed stages. Some software allows you to run it in a local cloud, in that case the problem is sort of solved, with the possible caveat of license checking and connecting to a license server that may no longer be running as mentioned above.
Though there will probably be some developers who will write software to convert Onshape files should it be possible some day to download Onshape projects as Onshape files.

[Art V]

10 hours ago, digitalcarbon said:

any comments that it did not crash in the 51hrs that i used it?

or 

that it was so simple that i got my wife to set up sheets & BOM? 

No, I would be have been surprised if it would have crashed.  Onshape is basically a client/server system and such systems tend to be quite reliable as almost everything is done on the server, which is built to be able to handle such things  This unlike local hardware where the variety in components and quality as well as possible software conflicts greatly increases the risk/chance for crashes or things otherwise not working smoothly.

 

Because Onshape has full control over the software they can make it work and pre-program the basic things, so creating sheets and BOM should be relatively simple as that should be standardized to the extent of pushing a button and you should more or less have been forced to fill out/specify the relevant data, either by object/symbol selection or because some data input is mandatory.

IF VW would use a similar approach then I think quite a few people may complain it would be too rigid or not flexible enough.

 

That being said, Onshape is primarily about MCAD and not as much into freeform CAD like Vectorworks so it probably also excludes some exotic routes that could make things fail unlike Vectorworks where you could go in any direction but the right one and then expect it to be fixed.

[zoomer]

1 hour ago, Art V said:

CADWorx can also do structures, equipment like pumps, vessels, reactors etc.

 

Saw this today too in the links you sent to me.

Looked exactly like digitalcarbon work

And I saw some posts about other software collaborating with Onshape data.

But I think that was another brand (ARES ?), not B-thing related.

[Art V]

36 minutes ago, zoomer said:

And I saw some posts about other software collaborating with Onshape data.

But I think that was another brand (ARES ?), not B-thing related.

Yes, that is Ares by Gräbert (Germany). They have an cloud based browser DWG drawing program called Kudo which is also used as the basis for Onshape's cloud based (2D) DWG editing. Gräbert/Ares is also available for Windows/Mac/Linux like B-thing but also has presence on cloud (Kudo) and Android/iPhone/iPad to create/modify drawings. They focus largely on 2D though and their 3D is basic compared to Vectorworks/Onshape/B-thing. 

 

Ares is also the basis for Draftsight, CorelCAD and some other CAD programs as they were originally an OEM provider offering their software for rebranding and Ares Commander was their showcase program, so it is a brand that was not that well known with the public at large. This is now changing a bit. So for those needing to edit DWG files natively this could be another option next to B-thing and Draftsight/CorelCAD depending on the preferred platform.

Edited October 30, 2017 by Art V

[Christiaan]

12 hours ago, Art V said:

Well... the nasty detail is called "activation checking"

 

Ah yes, didn't think of that! Mind you, if worse came to worse we could convert back to a version that uses our dongles. 2009 I think. Or perhaps even 2012.

[Art V]

2 hours ago, Christiaan said:

 

Ah yes, didn't think of that! Mind you, if worse came to worse we could convert back to a version that uses our dongles. 2009 I think. Or perhaps even 2012.

Well... when switching to the US version using online activation instead of a dongle I had to return the dongle.
The upside that forgetting the dongle when using a laptop is no longer a problem as it is activated on the laptop. The downside is that you no longer can quickly install it on another machine and use the dongle to run VW if the current machine crashes.

 

You win some, you lose some as they say.

[Christiaan]

Shame they don't provide both options.