Hi All,
The future of Elements Direct is pretty clear now, it seems:
1. Elements direct has entered 'maintenance mode', as no real development efforts are made anymore, it's in some distant corner of the website, and the original development team doesn't exist anymore.
2. Creo Direct (positioned as the new direct modeler where we could migrate to) is not going anywhere and isn't positioned as next step for Elements Direct anymore. It's not even mentioned as Creo CAD anymore (only parametric is there now).
3. Parametric has some 'direct capabilities', and they seem to work hard to make transitioning to Parametric as easy as possible (migrating 2D drawings for example).
So, PTC has clearly decided that Elements Direct is going to be phased out. I would like to know what the future plans of users are. I can think of a few options:
1. Switch to Parametric
2. Switch to another CAD system
3. Hold on as long as possible and keep maintenance
4. Hold on as long as you can keep it running without maintenance
5. A combination of the above
For our business the direct modeling is vital and there currently is no good alternative available. Also, we have a lot of software developed on top of Elements Direct. So we decided to hold on (for now with maintenance), but start investigating other CAD options and keep an eye on all the developments. My first impression is that we will definitely not switch to Creo Parametric. PTC doesn't seem to keep our interests high on their priority list and parametric doesn't match with our business. I think we will start testing Solid Edge Synchronous technology as our first step. At this point maintenance is only an insurance for future platform support, but even new versions can be tricky. For us version 19 already had more new bugs than features, but there was windows 10 support. Not sure how long we will keep maintenance. It's a gamble how long the software works nicely on new versions of windows and graphics cards.
What are your plans? Are you going to switch as soon as possible or are you going to hold on as long as possible?