Here we are, at long last. Three months of teaser blogs is enough by most standards. More than a year of whiteboarding, customer interviews, site visits, and board presentations is enough by any standard. Your continued, sometimes fervent, interest and curiosity is very much appreciated. So without further ado, let me tell you about what we’ve built over the last year.
First things first – there’s a bit of housekeeping on the agenda. You may remember reading something a while back about Stratasys acquiring GrabCAD. That’s true. Don’t believe me? Scroll to the bottom of this page and look at the footer. See where it says “Stratasys?” Doesn’t get any more official than that.
Stratasys is best known for making truly incredible professional 3D printers. GrabCAD is best known for making really awesome software that makes the lives of professional engineers a lot easier. You see where this is going. Great 3D printers deserve equally great software. Enter GrabCAD Print. Let’s jump into the details.
What is GrabCAD Print?
GrabCAD Print is a cloud-based solution that brings connectivity and accessibility to 3D printing. Anyone who’s ever used a 3D printer knows that we don’t yet live in a world where you can print at the click of a button.
In fact, if you ask anyone who uses 3D printers regularly about their workflow, they’re likely to tell you that they have as many as five or six programs open just to prep the model and tray.
That’s crazy. Let’s change that.
Let’s talk about features
Less STL, More CAD
You know what else is crazy? STLs. I went on at length in the first teaser post about why the STL is inferior. I’ll spare you a rehash.
GrabCAD Print lets you print directly from your CAD file. If you don’t want to mess around with an STL, you don’t have to. The choice is yours to make.
Business Intelligence, finally
Professional 3D printing is a serious investment. It deserves serious, industrial strength reporting. GrabCAD Print gives engineers, operators, and stakeholders the data they need to justify new investments and report on current ones.
Want to know how many print jobs you ran last year? Or which department is using which printers most often? Want to know precisely how much material each department is using so you know where to send the bill? GrabCAD Print lets you see all of that and more.
Scheduling and monitoring
Multiple printers with multiple users in a shared office setting without an easy way to see who is printing what on which 3D printer is a recipe for disaster. GrabCAD Print solves that problem with a unified scheduler view and a proper queue manager. Now you don’t have to wonder who started a 56-hour print job on a Wednesday afternoon. Instead, you can find that person and have a pleasant chat about printer etiquette.
And you also don’t need to come into the office on the weekend just to see how a print is doing. You can just look at your phone. Or open your laptop from your couch. It is 2016 after all.
Learn more / How do you get it?
Nobody really wants to read a blog post to learn about every single software feature. I know that. Fortunately, there’s a video you can watch with a list of features that’s a little easier to digest.
GrabCAD Print beta will be available this summer. We’re so close to giving it to you. But not quite yet. Sign up at the bottom of that info page and be the first to be know when GrabCAD Print goes into public beta for the world to see.
Digital manufacturing is here, we just have a connectivity problem. We’re going to fix that. We’ve also got a bold new software strategy that’s based around the GrabCAD platform:
- Community for sharing, learning, and innovating
- Workbench for CAD collaboration
- GrabCAD Print for unifying 3D printing ecosystems.
Digital manufacturing isn’t going anywhere without GrabCAD. We can’t wait to keep going.
