Do we need another collaboration tool for mechanical design? Let’s talk about CCE’s EnSuite-Cloud ReVue. It really is focused on enabling mechanical design collaboration. There are a couple of these types of tools that are out there. But this is a really interesting one, especially in the context of the pandemic. Everybody is working from home nowadays. It is the new normal. Some companies are not going to be going back to an office. So the need to be able to communicate in lots of different ways is super important, and this solution has a unique approach.

How Does CCE EnSuite-Cloud ReVue Work?

Let’s talk about how this works. You load a model in your browser into a session. Then, you can share a link to invite others. They connect to your session. Now, one caveat right up front is that the people that remotely connect do not gain access to your model. It is not shared. The only thing that is shared is the visual of the model itself.

The audio is also shared. It’s like Zoom in that you can hear each other back and forth.  However, the native model or any other exported model is not shared with remote participants. Now, this is a shared session. The person who started the session can spin, pan, zoom at a very high fidelity and fast response rate. The remote participants see what the person in control is doing. You can also exchange control. The remote person can take over. They can spin, pan, zoom, take measurements, and do cross sections. There’s a lot that you can do within this tool.

It’s really interesting in that respect. Now, you can also pause the shared session, then go off and do your measurements. And this is true of multiple remote participants. You can have a shared session. There is actually a pause button where you can toggle in and out of the shared session. You’re all still talking but each of you can pause it, go off and explore the design the way you want to.

Again, there’s no central cloud server here. You’re actually connecting browser to browser. So you don’t have to worry about, “Hey, my IP is at risk in the cloud.” It is actually the view of it is being shared at a very highly optimized rate with others.

So why is this so interesting in terms of a solution? It seems like everybody wants to rush to get on the cloud right now. There are some advantages with the cloud. However, in cases where you are concerned with protecting intellectual property, you don’t always want to share this rich 3D model that has all this intellectual property in it. So that’s a really interesting piece of it.

The other thing that’s unique here is the audio. It is like a Zoom session, except it’s much more high fidelity and more control specific to these tools. You can share control back and forth, but it’s very high performant. These are the types of tools that are needed in the industry since many people will continue to work from home.

It’s not just connecting to a central server and having your IP there, and everything’s shared back out from there. This is a very interesting and different approach that protects intellectual property while supporting the need to collaborate, whether it’s design reviews or feedback from customers and lots of other different scenarios.