Interesting news from Vector Works, Teaming up with Adobe

[BiikeMike]

I just got the following email from Nemetschek North America, the parent company for a fairly large CAD program, Vector Works.

A NOTE FROM THE CEO
Nemetschek announced at the beginning of January a broad strategic partnership with Adobe that will affect much of our product line, including VectorWorks. This follows the release of VectorWorks 12.5 and its enhanced PDF capabilities. Some have asked how this partnership is different from just a technology license agreement. In particular, I've been working with Patrick Aragon, senior product marketing manager, Adobe Acrobat in AEC and manufacturing, at Adobe on defining what this partnership will mean for VectorWorks customers.

Essentially, the partnership is an indication that both companies will be actively working together to extend the use of PDF in AEC collaboration. As far as future plans for our joint technologies are concerned, we have shared our respective roadmaps with each other. Adobe is excited to be getting feedback on its roadmap for PDF and Acrobat, and both companies are looking forward to creating a dialogue about how we can jointly address the needs of customers in 2D and 3D environments.

The overriding strategy in this partnership is to make PDF a more commonly used format for the collaboration workflow in AEC. Right now, many people use PDF as a one-way method for people to "see" the drawing, but we plan to work together to make it more central to collaboration: a way to exchange information round trip. Information can be lost in translation, even with some of the common 2D formats in use today—whereas PDF information has the reputation for translating and looking identical when the receiver gets it. Any workflow where you need to mark up a drawing or overlay information between different programs is ideal and can be done much more reliably using PDF.

In addition, there is a need to integrate different types of files other than just CAD into document sets. CAD is just one part of the building documentation process, and yet CAD systems focus on CAD-to-CAD translation primarily. Adobe and Nemetschek instead want to focus on the total collaboration needs of the AEC process.


Sincerely,

Sean Flaherty
CEO, Nemetschek North America

 

[mkrishnan]

That is an interesting idea. I wonder how they would go about doing it -- whether they would embed a lot of non-displayed rich drawing data in the PDF file, or what they would do. Drawing files in UG and so forth were always a pain in the butt... we would always come back to update a print and find that some element was magically missing or wrong for no apparent reason.