June 2021

As the summer holiday period starts, I want to salute all parents out there. We’ve just had a 2-year-old (incl a very exhausted mother) in the house for 5 weeks. Even with 3 adults and a teenager who came over to help every couple days, it was something else. Give yourselves and your partners a pat on the back, especially now that you’ve managed to get through the worst of the COVID lockdowns (I hope)! What a ride 👏

Far, our CTO, has 3 kids in the house and yet, he and his team are cranking it out like never before. Three fairly major changes, all based on client requests, were released in June:

1) Additional Document Versioning

Some customers are now using Authentise as a Product Data Management (PDM) alternative. We’re not looking to become a fully fledged PLM alternative, but for low complexity assembly structures, Authentise can do a great job tracking the history from start to finish. Why add complexity with another platform?

There are going to be a few changes necessary to meet PDM needs. One is to make sure we have proper versioning of all documents, not just design files as we do now.

That change was just the beginning. Expect to see a flurry of announcements that relate to traceability in the next month or two as we mature the PDM side of our business.

2) Speeding up Pre-productionWe’ve also made User Experience changes to enable users to move through steps in pre-production more quickly. Our designers are always striking a balance between convenience and traceability, but in this case I think they were spot on.

I’ve spotted a couple other updates regarding the usability of pre-production in the roadmap, so if you have any feedback on how to make it work better, please let us know.

3) Overhauled Model LibraryKept the best for last: The model library has had a general overhaul. Not only is it now easier to search thanks to both gallery and list views, but each of those is also easier to manage thanks to a dozen smaller improvements like shortening the view of tags. In addition, we’ve added a new concept that we’ll be making much more use of in future: the big modal. This opens up on top of the page and allows us to load relevant information for you, wherever you are.

The giant model now appears on the model library page but soon you’ll see it all over.

Changes like these updates to model library, pre-production and versioning, originated in conversation with clients and then pursued in collaboration with them, are what helps Authentise gets better every single day. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts about what could or should change.

Reach out! Hope to hear from you soon!

Until then, all the best…