(continued from yesterday’s post)

I think my favorite enhancement is that now DriveWorks Pro can be used as a sales configurator. True, true DriveWorks 6 did allow users sales groups to help produce sales quotes and approval models very quickly. However honestly, DriveWorks 6 is more of a design automation tool than something you would put in front of a customer to create a first impression. It worked best if your sales associate sat with his potential customer and they used DriveWorks together.

Now that DriveWorks Pro is more of a sales configurator, it is something you could put on your own web site [via DriveWorks Live], and allow your customers to directly interface with your product. Imagine your customer connecting to your site, he enters the parameters for your product, the approval models and a quote are sent directly to him and if he likes it, he could enter in is PO number and production drawings go right to your production facility.

If you saw DriveWorks Live in version 6, it is a child compared to what it is like in version 7. It is browser independent, allows for popup windows (the good kind, not spammy) and is significantly more customizable.

DriveWorks 6 did have a very simple workflow – Saved specifications, specifications pending release, and released specifications. As a design automation tool that pretty much did the job. Now that DriveWorks 7 can involve the customer and sales team more, DriveWorks 7 has significantly improved how specifications flow through your origization. The flow is now customizable, and has a graphical interface that is similar to how you would build a flow chart in Microsoft Visio. The workflow helps automate the entire sales approval process to ensure the customized design data gets to your production floor as quickly as possible ensuring vital steps are not missed along the way.

Eight more days until the release date…

Two of my all time favorite jokes are: “Two guys walk into a bar…which is kinda funny because after the first one did, you’d thought the second would have seen it!” and “We’ll put a man on Saturn before DriveWorks 7 comes out!”. While they are both funny to me, I admit I get more laughs with the first joke.

Not surprisingly it appears the second joke will be even less funny after February 19^th because….that is the date of the DriveWorks 7 release! Yup after almost three years, the good folks at DriveWorks are updating their flag ship product. [In their defense, they have been rather busy -releasing DriveWorks Solo  in October.] I got my first sneak peek of DriveWorks 7 over a year ago, and this year old gag order was beginning to chafe a bit. Now the gag as been removed and I can finally tell you a little bit about it.

DriveWorks Pro, as I believe DriveWorks 7 will commonly be called, has over three years of improvements. I’ll give you a little taste today, then finish the rest in tomorrow’s post.

First, DriveWorks Pro no longer uses Excel as its backbone engine –it now has its own solving engine, with this new lower overhead you’ll notice a performance increase right away. All Excel functions are still available, so we are keeping the good and leaving the bad behind.

There are tons of little productivity enhancements – too many to list in a blog…most of them involve getting rid of all the little steps you had to do in DriveWorks 6 to make things work. As an example in DriveWorks 6, if you wanted to be able to move your project from one directory to another, first you had to make a variable of your path, then you had to use that variable to represent your path in your file name rules. Certainly not a difficult task, but it took two steps AND you had to know to do those steps. Now by default, your files can be relative to the project and thus projects are much more portable. Lots of little things that were easy -if you knew how to do them have been made easier because you don’t have to do them any longer!

As Glen, co-founder of DriveWorks said: “Everyone says their product is easy to use. No one puts on the box: ‘Now harder to use than ever’ our goal was to make using the  product much more intuitive.” Intuitive it is! The new interface is cleaner and faster, many less hoops to go through to get your rules built.

Nice productivity enhancements, but are there any new features? Yeah, I’ll tell you about them tomorrow.