STEP Tools News for October 12

[Martin Hardwick]

This weekly newsletter is a brief update of what is going on in STEP
and at STEP Tools, Inc.  If you want to know more, try the STEP Tools
web site (http://www.steptools.com) or the contact for each article.

I am still in the Far East. This week I am visiting STEP centers
in Korea and Japan. The big news item is a series of extensions
to our translation service that should have been installed while
I was in China: one extension is for end users; one for system
administrators and one for STEP information modelers.

--------------------
Visualization Service on our Web Site

The ST-WebExchange Visualization Service has been added to our web
site. The new demonstration shows you how ST-WebExchange can be used to
produce visualizations of your product data for your supply chain.  We
have a small collection of models available for viewing, and soon, you
will be able to visualize your own data via the Translation Service.

	http://www.steptools.com/demos/webexchange

--------------------
AP-203 Checking on our Web Site

When a data exchange goes wrong the system administrator needs to find
out if something is wrong with the system that produced the data or the
system that is reading the data. 

One of the advantages of STEP is that its data models contain a lot of
rules that can be used to distinguish between good and bad data. A system
that checks the rules that apply to AP-203 has been added to our web
site. If the file is OK then the problem is in the system that is reading
the data. If the file does not conform to all the rules then at least
some of the problems are in the translator that produced the data file.

	http://www.steptools.com/translate

--------------------
Short Form EXPRESS compiler

STEP Information Modelers who want to compile short form models can now
compile them on our Translation Service. The compiler will compile your
model against a set of integrated resources already on the web site and
report back any errors in your model. This saves you having to create a
file that contains all the integrated resources.

      http://www.steptools.com/translate

--------------------
Translation Service Statistics

Summary:
	Period Covered: Sun Oct  4 00:00:00 1998 -- Sun Oct 11 00:00:00 1998
	Total usage: 90
	Successful usage: 55 (61%)
	Errors: 35 (38%)

Year to Date Summary:
	Total usage: 994
	Successful usage: 650 (65%)
	Errors: 344 (34%)

--------------------
Why Customers Prefer our Products

STEP Tools, Inc. software is installed at over 300 sites on a wide
variety of UNIX and PC boxes. It is used in commercial CAD, CAM, CAE
tools like Unigraphics, Bentley, 3D-Eye/Trispectives, Alias/Wavefront,
Hitachi Zosen, Bridgeport Controls and Tecnomatix.  You can find a list
of reasons why people prefer our products at:
    
    http://www.steptools.com/products/stdev/reasons.html


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