Visualize This

In a nutshell, enterprise visualization is about providing technical data to non-technical users. In most large enterprises there are large amounts of data that is really only available to engineers - most CAD software packages are expensive and very hard to use for people without engineering experience.

Enterprise visualization is about making that information available to everyone in an organization by providing an easy-to-use interface that allows non-technical users to view, annotate and measure a wide range of document.

Oracle's enterprise visualization product is called AutoVue - you can find more information about it at http://www.oracle.com/applications/autovue/index.html.

I guess I should say a few words about who I am, and why I'm saying all of this stuff about enterprise visualization.

I've worked with visualization for many years, starting out as a 'Visualization Wizard' writing visualization software for a computational fluid dynamics product. I started working on the AutoVue product in 2002, first as the dev lead for the Unix port of AutoVue and then on the product management team.

I live in the beautiful city of Montreal, and outside of office hours, I'm an amateur photographer and digital artist in what little spare time is left after raising my one-year-old daughter, Kaia.

I'm quite happy to announce that as of about a week ago, a new version of AutoVue is available, AutoVue 19.3. The new release includes many improvements, but some of the the biggies include a greatly improved user experience, improvements to the markup/annotation abilities, and the new AutoVue Mobile product - which allows disconnected usage of AutoVue and enables supply chain collaboration.

I'll be talking more about the new features in the next few weeks, but if your impatient you can check out the "what's new" page: http://www.oracle.com/applications/feature-whats-new-in-autovue-enterprise-visualization-release-19-3.html

Found via Engadget - a dual screen laptop. Not going to be available for at least a couple of years, most likely - but it would be a very interesting tool for visualization - the lower touch screen could be used to manipulate the objects being visualized, and to provide a very natural way to add annotations.

One of the places that AutoVue (and Enterprise Visualization in general) can bring a lot of value is when integrated into a content management or product lifecycle management system. These systems can have millions of documents, sometimes in hundreds of different formats. With AutoVue, users can easily view and interact with the vast majority of these documents.

From the user's perspective, it's quite simple - Usually there is a 'View in AutoVue' button or menu item for each document, and when the user clicks on it, they see the AutoVue UI appear displaying the document. They then have access to all of AutoVue's functionality - measurement, annotation, real-time collaboration.

Behind the scenes, of course, it's a little more complicated. The AutoVue server needs to have access to the document to display it, so it needs to be able to reach into the backend system (content management, product lifecycle management, etc) and extract the document. To make matters worse, most 3d CAD models, and many 2D CAD models are actually composed of many separate files, and AutoVue needs to be able to find all of the related files (usually called xrefs) so the entire CAD model can be displayed.

Fortunately we provide pre-built integrations for many of the most common content and product lifecycle management systems, including Oracle UCM (formerly Stellent), Oracle Agile PLM, MiscroSoft Sharepoint, and EMC Documentum. We also provide an easy to use integration SDK that makes it quite easy to implement your own integration to a backend system we don't currently support.

Annotation is one of the biggest value-adds that AutoVue provides for enterprise visualization. AutoVue can create what are called 'markup files' that can be thought of as a transparent sheet of plastic laid over the document that you can draw and write on. These files are saved separately, so users can annotate a document that they cannot edit. A single markup file can also contain the annotations from multiple people, and there are powerful filtering tools to make it possible to see things like "All comments made by Bob after april 15th".

The most common usage of annotations is through a review workflow - a collection of people, in series or in parallel, review a document and add their comments. The document could be an office document (word, pdf, excel, etc.), a raster image (jpeg, png, tiff, etc.), or a CAD document (AutoCad, Pro/E, Catia, etc.) - the annotations are collected in a consistent way, using the same user interface independent of the document type. Once the review is done, the responsible person can examine all of the comments and assign each one that needs action to the appropriate person.

If a content or product lifecycle management system is used, then the annotations can be stored in that system, associated with the document being reviewed. This makes it trivial for anyone with the proper access to the document to view the comments.

Annotations can of course be used in many other ways as well - such as tracking changes that are found during an onsite visit to a plant, or allowing a customer to indicate exactly where a problem is occurring. Future posts will talk about some of these use cases in more detail.

The content catalogue for Oracle OpenWorld 2008 is up, and we have 3 sessions about AutoVue and Enterprise Visualization:

• AutoVue Enterprise Visualization Integration Drives Innovation and Operational Efficiency
  
• Optimize Global Supply Chain Collaboration and Protect Valuable Intellectual Property with AutoVue Enterprise Visualization
  
• AutoVue for Improved Collaboration on Technical Documents Across the Enterprise
  

For more details, go to the catalogue and search for the Focus Area "Portals and Collaboration", and then use your browser search to find the AutoVue sessions.

We will also have a presence on the demo floor, and AutoVue will be making a cameo appearance in a number of other session.

Hope to see you there!

We're getting quite excited about the potential for combining AutoVue's enterprise visualization capabilities with CRM software - an effort we're calling Visual CRM. The idea is to empower people working in areas like customer support and field services, by providing them with 3d collaboration tools.

Imagine being on a customer support call with a customer who has noticed a problem with a particular part of a front-end loader - if you could start a 3d real-time collaboration session with the customer, and let them directly annotate where the problem is, and then once the service request (SR) is created, save the 3D annotation with the SR, so that the service person can see exactly where the problem was observed.

We think it's going to be a pretty powerful tool. We're planning a public webinar on this topic titled "Enhance Aftermarket Revenue and Customer Experience with Visual CRM" on August 13th at 12pm Eastern. You can find more details by going to http://launch.oracle.com/ and logging in with the PIN yes2visualcrm - the annoucement for the webinar is on the "Events" tab, and you can sign up there.