Creo Elements

[JamesAvis]

What do you think about the new Creo suite of tools? Is it just a fancy rebranding, a money grab, a software revolution, or somewhere in between? Are you excited about it, not impressed, or just waiting to see what it can do with real data in the real world?

My two cents:

At the last World Event a PTC developer told me they would be utilizing the ProductView engine in future releases of ProE. Looks like that may be related to the open data kernel that allows all these new 'apps' to communicate smoothly.

The apps themselves appear to take ProductView 9.0, split it into functionally specific applications, and give it the ProductView 9.1 interface and speed. I'm glad they're bringing back a lot of functionality that was lost between PV 9.0 and 9.1, but I haven't seen much that was actually new in those live demos. It does look refined, though, and I'm hoping it's as fast as 9.1.

The two way communication between parametric and direct modeling looks like a great new feature. Without this there was no chance of us utilizing direct. Now it is at least possible.

I'll reserve my final conclusions until I can get my hands on it and try it with real data. Even then the first version of any new product, let alone a new PTC product, should be approached with care.

[tcooper]

Proof will be in the pudding. I'm worried about external references(speed), and juggling them with confidence of what your getting. So far I don't see anything new from what you can do with Pro/E, PV, and the acclaimed Blue Pipe already toting the interoperability of those products. This might be a new wrapper on existing solutions, rolled up in a collective kernel???

[TravisWernecke]

The most important thing I took away from the Creo webinar was the new naming convention. ProE, for better for worse, will now be Creo Elements Pro. We are all eventually going to make the change, or go with an entirely different product than a PTC offering. While it is still open to debate as to whether Creo will revolutionize CAD, it will revolutionace the PTC product lines and offerings. The jury is going to remain out on its effectiveness until we actually get a copy of CREO in hand, having said that I see great opportunities here.

The open architecture and apps based approach, I haven't seen it yet just taking them at their word, should allow us to eliminate many of our individual problems. We all have diverse needs, and the opportunity to address them with tailored solutions is unique to Creo (again if it works as advertised). PTC couldn't be very responsive to us before, they were trying to serve many different industries with a catch all product. There was no way they could fix problems for some users, without creating them for others. I work in oilfield completions design, and nearly every part in our world is round. There are problems in design that are unique to our equipment and industry that can now be tailored. In the future there will be problems to be sure, but they will be up to us to fix for ourselves to a degree that was never possible before. Who will accept that challenge?