Take advantage of the new capabilities of the 2015 version of BlueCielo Meridian.
CAD integration
BlueCielo Meridian provides integration with many applications. A full overview is provided in the Meridian 2015 supported software reference document, which also gives an overview of the supported operating systems and viewers. The latest versions are supported, such as:
- AutoCAD 2016 (including Civil 3D, Map 3D, P&ID, and Plant 3D)
- Inventor 2016
- SolidWorks 2015 SP1 and SP2
New in BlueCielo Meridian 2015 is the ‘Multiple Sheet and Title block support for AutoCAD’. Each AutoCAD layout can have its own title block with bi-directional synchronisation of Meridian properties.
For review, each layout can be automatically rendered to PDF and follow the appropriate workflow. Scanned drawings or other raster documents can be imported into the Meridian vault and converted into hybrid documents.
Power to the Web
BlueCielo has previously offered users of Meridian an Internet Explorer web browser in which to work. The functionality has always been a subset of the Windows Power-User client – until this release!
In Meridian 2015, we have made web access a major development theme to support the IT centralization efforts of our customers. After entering a vault, the entire user interface looks like the Windows Power client, with a scrollable document navigation panel, property pages of the selected document and a viewer panel; all in the same Internet Explorer or Chrome window.
Many other enhancements and functional additions have also been made.
Central deployment
Organisational requirements to manage technical asset related information are growing and IT requirements are shifting.
The market is moving more and more towards cloud-based solutions, but we also see that owner operators are not willing to have all their IP in the cloud. Thus, they often opt for centralisation while using cloud-based solutions for collaboration with external contractors and suppliers.
For centralised solutions, zero footprint web applications are needed, but working with large CAD files and their references creates high requirements for the technical infrastructure.
In the Meridian 2015 release, we have addressed the high engineering-related requirements by providing:
- Full featured web client
- Remote CAD integration was introduced in Meridian 2012
- Server-based viewing was introduced in Meridian 2013
- Web interface such as Windows Power client introduced in Meridian 2015
- Site cache, new in Meridian 2015, for faster upload and download speeds document content can be cached on remote sites while still connecting to the central server for all vault information
- Hypertrieve 5 as the default database engine in Meridian 2015, providing very high and consistent performance in large vaults with many users
- Default support for client virtualisation (for example, Citrix), under named licensing scheme
Revit 2016 for BIM
For building information management, Autodesk Revit plays a prominent role in the market. The integration of Meridian 2015 with Autodesk Revit 2016 makes the management of design projects possible.
In the Meridian 2015 release, we have added new features that enable project teams to work on large Revit projects, allowing them to:
- View the design in 3D
- Control the design integrity through use of central and local models
- Enable concurrent engineering by managing work sets
- Review the 2D output by adding automatically generated renditions of the sheets into the workflow
Collaboration packages
In Meridian 2015, we have introduced collaboration packages, which can be made by converting Explorer collections and are extended with a destination, an audit trail and revision awareness.
The packages can be made available to non-Meridian users by publishing them as a ZIP file to a file server. But unlike the current briefcase functionality, Explorer packages allow distribution to FTP or HTTP web sites as well. Publishing the packages requires the Meridian Enterprise extension license ‘BlueCielo Publisher for File System’.
In the Power user interface, all packages are shown to which a specific document is assigned.
HTV5 engine
Hypertrieve (HTV) is the standard database engine of Meridian. Previous versions worked with Hypertrieve 3, but as per Meridian 2015, we have made Hypertrieve 5 the default database engine. After extensive testing and further enhancements, the engine is fully stable and six times faster than HTV 3.
The effect of HTV 5 is that more content can be stored in Meridian and managed by more users, while the user experience remains constant.
Additional details can be found in this white paper.
For more details, please visit BlueCielo Company News page.
