All About Arbortext

An Interview with Jim Heppelmann, Executive Vice President of Software Solutions, and Chief Technical Officer, PTC 

PTC recently completed its acquisition of Arbortext, Inc., a leader in the emerging dynamic enterprise publishing market. With this XML-based software, PTC customers will be able to create, manage and dynamically publish critical information concurrently with the development of related physical products. In this interview, PTC/USER’s Rick Snider talks with Jim Heppelmann, Executive Vice President of Software Solutions and Chief Technical Officer at PTC, about what these new capabilities can do for Pro/ENGINEER users.

Rick Snider: Jim, can you give us your thoughts on why PTC’s acquisition of Arbortext makes sense? 

Jim Heppelmann: Sure, Rick. We believe this acquisition makes total sense for a variety of reasons, the most important being that it helps solve a big problem faced by our traditional installed base of discrete manufacturing companies. Our customers have long complained that it takes too much time to create technical publications, it is difficult to reuse CAD data, and that engineering changes to product designs are missed in the technical publications process. When combined with PTC’s solutions, Arbortext will enable companies to rapidly create and publish smarter, more customer-friendly, and more accurate technical documents. Getting better reuse of Pro/ENGINEER CAD data in downstream technical publications is also a golden opportunity for our stronghold industries of industrial equipment, high-tech, automotive, and aerospace.    

From a technology perspective, Arbortext’s products are beautifully aligned with PTC’s. What Pro/ENGINEER did for solid models is exactly what Arbortext is doing for text-based publications. Both are parametric in the sense that they separate hard-wired parameters from underlying design intent to promote greater reuse. In the case of documents, Arbortext separates content from formatting to allow the same information to be reused in multiple documents and delivery media.  Both are component-based in that they build up the final deliverable from reusable component parts. In Arbortext, a document is made up of chunks of text and graphics, just as a Pro/ENGINEER design is made of parts and sub-assemblies. And both are associative in that they adapt gracefully to change, offering automated ways to regenerate all applicable downstream outputs. Really, both Arbortext and PTC have been telling similar stories all along. It makes good sense to bring the two pieces together. 

RS: So, what does this mean for PTC—a shift in your core target industries?   

JH:  No, I wouldn’t say it shifts our target industries. This concept is a perfect fit for PTC and strengthens our Product Development System for our traditional manufacturing customers. It also give us opportunities to expand into adjacent markets that need the same forms of Create, Collaborate, Control, and Communicate capabilities for text documents. These would include pharmaceuticals, publishing, government, and financial services.

RS: What about the value of these solutions for those of us in engineering? 

JH: Have you ever shipped documentation that didn’t match the product because of a late design change? Have you ever had to update several different types of output (a printed document, a web page, etc.) because of a product change? Do you waste time doing a lot of copying and pasting because there is a lot of common content to incorporate across many documents? Do you convert sophisticated Pro/ENGINEER data to IGES to get it into technical publications?

These are very common problems, and the solution to them is what we call dynamic publishing.  But dynamic publishing is an integrated solution, not a single piece of technology. Think about the required elements.

• First, you need to be able to create and structure documents in a smart way, so that they are managed as a collection of reusable components. Arbortext Editor does this, and of course Pro/ENGINEER is a fantastic way to create 3D models and 2D and 3D drawings that are also components of the documentation.

• Second, you need to be able to manage all of the text and graphics components, including changes and alternative configurations—again, at a very granular, component level. This need for content management is where Windchill comes into play.  After all, we’ve mastered that thanks to Pro/ENGINEER. 

• Then, you need to be able to automatically extract the right components from the data vault, construct the documents properly, add the right formatting, and publish the information in different formats such as PDF or HTML. The specific solution for this is Arbortext Publishing Engine. 

• Finally, you would like users to be able view and even interact with that data in a web page, which is where ProductView fits in. 

In combination, this integrated solution helps eliminate the manual, repetitive, error-prone steps typically entailed in developing technical publications. The result is documentation that is richer, more interactive, accurate, and generated in a fraction of the time. It is also easy to localize to multiple languages, reconfigure to reflect product variants, or adapt to match a customized product. 

RS: How about other areas within the enterprise that are outside of engineering?

JH: There is a great application within marketing. When combined with the photorealistic rendering capabilities of Pro/ENGINEER, Arbortext can be used to create slick, colorful marketing collateral for products that have never even been prototyped. But really any organization that produces documents can benefit from this technology. For example, the financing arm of an automotive or industrial equipment company produces product-related information. These information products—leasing or rental contracts, say—are generally printed documents that must accurately reflect details of specific product lines. Often, though, these groups are among the last to know when design changes are made. The result is that their work is never updated. By tying into the same technology, albeit for a much different use, marketing can get the same advantages we mentioned for engineering. 

RS: How are the Arbortext products licensed and packaged? 

JH: The two primary Arbortext products are Arbortext Editor and Arbortext Publishing Engine.  Arbortext Editor is sold on a node-locked user basis, with a floating/shared license option. Arbortext Publishing Engine is sold on an initial server basis, with the option to add servers.

RS: What about those companies that previously bought Arbortext but do not use Windchill? How will the acquisition affect them? 

JH: Prior to the acquisition, Arbortext did not have a content management offering, so early customers needed to integrate or customize their own solutions. Those customers may of course continue to use these solutions. In fact, it is PTC’s strategy to retain relationships with Arbortext’s existing technology partners. But most customers would likely prefer to have all of the necessary components—such as CAD, text editing, content management, content publishing, and visualization—already integrated in a way that provides the full range of benefits I mentioned.

That’s where our solution really stands out. A tremendous strength of Windchill—in this case, Windchill PDMLink—is to be the single repository for managing ALL product information, from MCAD and ECAD to software and documents. All of this needs to be linked together and linked to common change management processes, something that standalone content management systems never can do. Plus, Windchill facilitates product development collaboration both inside and outside the company, in real time or asynchronously. With all these core capabilities in place, we can take the next step of extending Windchill’s capabilities to visualize, share, and manage different configurations of documents.

RS: What is the timeframe for integrating Arbortext with Windchill PDMLink?

JH: Timeframes for future R&D work always need to be prefaced with caveats. We do a rigorous job validating our software builds, fixing problems, and re-qualifying until our release criteria have been met. This means schedules don’t always hold firm. That being said, we are targeting the first phase of integration—which essentially involves having Windchill be the content management system for these smart documents—to be available by the M20 maintenance build of Windchill 8.0, expected in spring 2006. 

RS: What will this mean for pre-existing partnerships such as Documentum?

JH:  It is our plan to maintain these relationships where possible. For any given account or sales engagement, the partnership plan should be driven by what’s right for the customer. 

RS: Can you talk about future enhancements impacting Pro/ENGINEER?

JH: We envision that Pro/ENGINEER will be able to supply documents with lightweight, associative graphical content, tweaked and stylized in a way that’s suitable for technical publications. Also incorporated into that document will be Arbortext Editor-supplied text. Imagine a service manual that contains maintenance instructions in the form of 3D product information in addition to textual content. What better application for 3D drawings? If you were to view that manual on the web or a mobile device, you could interact not with a static JPEG picture, but rather a content-rich, dynamic product viewable.  

For more information about Arbortext, please visit www.ptc.com/company/arbortext/.