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Doccupoint Phone: 408-523-1815 Fax: 408-735-9111
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Steve Potter heads up Docupoint.
upFront.eZine: Tell me a bit about your company and its products. Docupoint: Our primary product is DrawingSearcher, which combines a search engine, Web server, and DWF/PNG rendition application for AutoCAD. Customers use DrawingSearcher to make large archives of AutoCAD drawings available on their intranet. Think of it as Google for AutoCAD.
upFront.eZine: It must be a pain to create all those archives initially! Docupoint: DrawingSearcher's cataloging process is fully automatic, so large numbers of drawings can be made available on-line with almost no labor. Archives of tens of thousands of drawings are common.
upFront.eZine: You have some other software products, as well? Docupoint: Our other products include Whip-n-Post!, a family of DWG-to-DWF conversion utilities. And our soon to be released Zing! DWF viewer. [Interested upFront.eZine readers are welcome to download a preview of Zing from http://www.docu-point.com/upfront.htm .]
upFront.eZine: From what I've read, it sounds to me like your DWF viewer is diverging from Autodesk's direction. Docupoint: Autodesk's viewers are getting larger and, I believe, less directed to the original vision of WHIP [plug-in for Web browsers]. Our goal is to make a very compact (less than 400KB) highly-directed product for the DWF-only market running on multiple platforms, including Pocket PC and Netscape browsers. I like to think that we are complementing Autodesk's products and direction. One of our primary reasons for developing our own viewer was to provide better integration between DrawingSearcher and the viewing application. (Viewer problems are the most common tech support question we get with DrawingSearcher.) Because the Zing! viewer is less then 400KB, we anticipate installing it automatically as a downloadable CAB(inet) file.
upFront.eZine: Does anyone actually use DWF? Or is it being swamped by other Internet vector standards, like VML and XML? Docupoint: Autodesk created the DWF format as a published, open standard to encourage the development supporting applications. We've found that almost all our DrawingSearcher users enable the DWF and PNG (preview image) publishing options. DWFs are much smaller then DWGs, and load very quickly. I've found that one of the most common reasons for using DWF files is to protect the original DWG file from un-authorized downloads and editing. As for other formats, SVG (simple vector graphics) seems to have potential, but so far it has not been realized. Because we concentrate on publishing the 2D representation of DWG files, we've not gotten involved in VML. I do notice a renewed interest in the use of the PDF format for drawing publishing.
upFront.eZine Who do you consider your competition? Docupoint: That is an interesting question. There is no product that provides functions similar to DrawingSearcher. At some level we complete with Cyco and Synergis; we are, however, solving a different problem. Docupoint's strength is providing enterprise-wide search-and-publish capabilities for large drawing archives.
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