One of my old Revit students was an ex-Catia user from IBM. He was
telling & showing me some stuff about Catia. It's surprising how
similar they are, Revit & Catia, when you get under the hood so to
speak. But they work very differently. Catia is completely modular,
with little packages that work together to do different tasks. So, for
example, if you're only going to be making flat things, like sheet
metal work & brackets and such, you only need certain modules, but if
you're going to be doing airplanes, you'll need a different collection
of modules altogether.
Frank's office apparently has been customizing and modifying Catia for
years and years, and now they are teaming up with IBM to make those
ad-hock inner-office things into actual products for other Architects.
So what I'm guessing is that there will be a couple of Catia
Architect 'modules' that are for different common tasks within our
industry, and you'll be able to mix & match them to your hearts content.
I think Catia's step into the AEC market will be an interesting one,
however keep in mind that Catia is still *very* expensive (you have to
pay for all those modules separately, and they aren't cheap), and
*very* complex. Catia has always been a 'big gun' if you will, and the
only reason Frank's office uses it as they do is because it was the
only thing out there 15 years ago that could do what they wanted to
do. I doubt too many 'typical' Architect offices, from one to fifty
people, will ever really touch Catia IMHO.
Jeffrey
Steve_Stafford wrote:
> You said: "...have a client database, sketch and submittal logs, shop drawing logs, project correspondence, etc...."
>
> I'm not sure "we" are best served with all of these as part of the domain of design software. Perhaps some...
>
> It is all "just" data, but I'm not sure that "we" need or want Revit to manage it directly. My preference would be to link client/consultant data from a corporate database and conversely to link relevant data from Revit to such a DB. Thus extending the value of both infrastructure through connectivity.
>
> But then such paradigm changing and visionary ideas are usually difficult to accept...we'll see I guess.