SOFTWARE: Data collaboration, 2-D CAD package available to Surpac users

VANCOUVER – Geovia, formerly known as Gemcom Software, has released Surpac™ 6.5. Alongside new features and user requested enhancements, Surpac 6.5 integrates with two new products – DraftSight Pro Pack, a full featured 2-D CAD tool for expanded plotting capabilities, and GEOVIA Hub™ 1.7 for a brand new data sharing and collaboration experience.

DraftSight Pro Pack helps increase productivity and reduce costs by providing geologists, mining engineers, and surveyors access to Dassault Systems’ full-featured 2-D CAD product to extend their plotting capabilities. With a familiar and intuitive user experience, DraftSight has been designed to enable Surpac users to get up and running with the software instantly. With more than 3.5 million downloads worldwide in over 100 countries, across 11 major industries, DraftSight provides a faster and more effective way to create, edit and view plots, including support for the widely used DWG file format. By providing seamless interoperability with Surpac, it eliminates the cumbersome import and export processes associated with other well known CAD products and geology and mine planning software. Beyond the time savings users will discover with the Surpac integration, DraftSight Pro Pack provides all the required tools, but at a much lower cost than other CAD packages.

Additional benefits to using DraftSight Pro Pack include the following.

• Simplify editing, dimensioning, annotation and final markup prior to publishing and distribution with the seamless integration and extended plotting capabilities now offered.
• Improve productivity by automating processes with the included easy-to-use APIs.
• Increase consistency and time savings with DraftSight’s design library by establishing reusable plotting components such as block or annotations.
• Easily identify changes by comparing graphical entities between two drawing components with a drawing compare tool.

The GEOVIA Hub™ Integration module allows Surpac users to exchange planning, production or exploration data on site or with other locations around the world. Hub centralises and secures data, enabling it to be easily shared, synchronised and published from within the Surpac user interface. With Hub, geology, engineering and survey teams always work with the latest version of the data. This improves collaboration, increasing user productivity and process efficiency by avoiding costly mistakes that can lead to rework, downstream errors and unexpected costs caused by data confusion, accidental deletion, loss and overwrites. When working with users located offsite, Hub overcomes the challenges posed by poor quality connections, reducing file transfer times from hours to minutes and seconds.

“A powerful aspect of Hub, and the integration, is the ability to lock files so that you can safely and confidently work on your data, safe in the knowledge that others will not be able to alter your data. The integration provides clarity about what information is currently in use, what information is the 'right' information to work with, without unnecessary communications to verify the data. The file icons clearly indicate the current status of files, what actions you need to take, and give immediate feedback once you've made changes to your data,” said Albert Quaye, chief geologist, Eurasian Natural Resources Corp., Democratic Republic of the Congo

Additional benefits to using Hub include the following.

• Users never have to check with their colleagues to find out what the correct version of data is, saving time and ensuring accuracy.
• Files can be locked by users to ensure they cannot be overwritten while they are being worked on avoiding costly mistakes.
• Data history can be audited to determine accurately who edited it and when.
• All versions of data are archived; should it ever be necessary, earlier versions of data can be rolled back with ease.
• New or updated files, folders and projects can be easily identified and downloaded.

To learn more about DraftSight Pro Pack, Hub and other enhancements included in Surpac 6.5, and to watch overview videos, please visit 3ds.com/GEOVIA/Surpac-product-news