Stardraw.com marketing director Rob Robinson explained that the beta program for Design 7 was announced publically on Friday 1 July and interested parties were invited to register. "Considering that it was the start of one of the biggest holiday weekends in the US, we were anticipating a slow take-up in the first week following the announcement. However, by Tuesday 5 July, despite the fact that there had been no working days in the US since the beta programme was announced, we already had well over 1000 registrants."
The application is Stardraw.com's seventh-generation software solution for systems integrators. Offering a holistic approach to system design and documentation, Stardraw Design 7 is a modular package which will enable integrators to custom configure the software to suit their particular specifications and budget.
Using an entirely new codebase, Stardraw Design 7 accesses a single project- and product-centric database which is accessible via tried and trusted task-oriented drawing environments such as 'Block Schematics' and 'Rack Layouts' as well as a new, grid-based product selector, says the company. A key advantage of this approach is that each environment is simply a 'view' of the central project database that contains all of the data relating to your project, right down to the last nut and bolt.
The Linkage feature means that changes made in any one drawing or environment will be automatically applied to all other drawings and views in the project. Further, a brand new feature in Design 7 is the Symbols Palette which enables you to see the products that are not being used in the current drawing.
"We're very proud of this new application; our most powerful and streamlined off-the-shelf design/documentation package yet," commented Stardraw.com CEO, David Snipp. "The codebase, although new to the product family, isn't new to us: it's been used by well over 25,000 customers of our OEM applications. Nevertheless, in order to be completely sure that our product responds fully to market requirements, we've initiated a public beta phase in order to give our customers the opportunity to come back to us with suggestions and observations."
(Jim Evans)
