I sent the following off to Autodesk soon after my original post.
{quote:title=cgsmith wrote:}Rather than having a server install which adds more programming risk on Autodesk's side and dealing with different server configurations, and extra burden on the end user (the company), maybe the only thing each Autodesk software requires is a mini Seek browser that scans the local content folder in real-time. For each piece of content in the library it can have one or more extra files containing some metadata (description, specifications, web link, etc just like on the Seek web site). Since you would be viewing the content from within the software itself, you would 3D View the object using the softwares own rendering engine, rather than relying on a 3D DWF as I believe Seek currently does. If a content item has some errors in the metadata or files, it either skips over it and reports an error or displays what it can.
Autodesk might even be able to come up with some ingenious way to cache files in the content library to speed up search times.
You would definitely require an admin software install or some extra CAD manager tools in the softwares UI to maintain the content library so that user is not having to deal with raw data files.
Overall, it might not be able to offer speeds that a dedicated database software can deliver, but it would be a far more simpler approach that is less prone to error.{quote}
This would be some great software value adding.
Regards,
Chad
