It has been a big week for our development team, with Canvas Envision, our new visual communication and collaboration platform, moving to GA (general availability). But, as anyone involved in software development knows, the product is never complete.
Work is already well underway on our second and third releases, with new functionality being developed for both the desktop Creator, and our Cloud, where users manage and share their documents, and viewers can access and interact with them.
The team’s excited by what’s coming in the next releases. While the product has only just launched, we’ve been in beta with customers for some months, so we have been learning a huge amount about the features and functions customers want us to bring to market.
We’re adding further depth to our 3D visualization and interaction capabilities, which are at the core of the Envision platform. These are complex functions and the focus of the team isalways on making them as accessible and easy to use as possible for the broadaudience Envision was designed for.
In particular we’re working hard on some very cool animation functions as well as extra dimensioning abilities which will help users create and share even more data about their products to key stakeholders.
And when it comes to how customers want to engage their audiences, we’ve seen a lot of interest in an embeddable viewerfor customer websites, so they can allow their own customers and prospects toview and interact with their product models at will. So watch out for something in that area…
Meanwhile, we know no product (and no customer) exists in a vacuum, so we are in the process of finalizing our first integrations, which we will be deploying very soon. I can’t give away the details yet, but think leading PLM solutions…
Then there's the issue of file size. Because you can put so much stuff in an .evdoc, the file sizes can become very large. (As an aside, this is a use case we've seen from some customers; using .evdocs in some instances as storage for a range of assets.) But super large file sizes aren't generally popular. So we will be introducing the ability of Envision documents to link to content elements in other documents, rather than have those elements in every .evdoc. It's an elegant solution to the sheer volume of content our customers are dealing with.
Further out we are looking at a number of ideas which stem from both internal discussion and customer requests. With such a versatile product the breadth of these ideas is significant and prioritizingthem according to need and opportunity is no mean feat. There are numerous integrations we could build and data types we could enable Envision to ingest and visualize.
One of our Canvas X graphics products which is used forvisualizing geospatial data has a large and loyal following for example.
But for now we are focused on the task athand, the next two releases, scheduled for later this quarter and early next. Watch this space.
