Prior to version 5.2, Electric Commander has offered two primary ways to access the API for scripting purposes: ectool and ec-perl. Both allow users to accomplish virtually any task within Commander, but it’s important to note there is a significant performance...
PDM/PLM-Product Data and Lifecycle Management
Leveraging Netapp’s Deduplication Feature
We recently obtained the necessary licenses required to enable one of our clients' FAS2050 filers for deduplication. Currently, deduplication is offered by Netapp for free. You simply need to get in touch with your reseller and request both ASIS licenses...
In the Trenches: How IT Outsourcing Makes Life Easier for R&D Engineers
Earlier this month we posted the second blog in a series on how IT outsourcing can deliver multiple benefits to organizations. This post will delve into the benefits to R&D Engineers. Engineers fear disruption to the organization, potential loss of jobs (including...
Enhancing Electric Commander Build Processes by Creating Dynamic Job Steps
In a simple, straight-forward implementation of a continuous integration pipeline you would typically create a chain of procedures that perform the same set of operations on the supplied input. This provides a build process that is well-defined, repeatable,...
Podcast: Peter Thorne Discusses Hot Trends in Product Lifecycle Engineering Tools
SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale speaks with Peter Thorne, director at Cambashi, a Cambridge, England-based independent industry analyst firm. With his over 30 years of experience as a software engineer user, vendor, and now analyst, Peter's in a great...
Integrity to Windchill Integration: A Product Demo
In a previous blog article I discussed, at a high level, the Integrity to Windchill integration for PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager. Now that we have seen some of the context of how the Integration is supposed to work, I thought it would be a good idea to actually...
The Difference Between Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
If you've spent any significant amount of time in the world of DevOps and Agile software development practices, you've likely encountered the terms Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). For several years, I've had these terms thrown around me...
Podcast: Oleg Shilovitsky Discusses the Difficulty BOM’s Across the Product Life Cycle
Last month, SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale spoke with PLM expert Oleg Shilovitsky on the difficulty of BOMs across engineering disciplines. In part two of the discussion, they focus in on the difficulty of BOMs across the product life cycle. This is...
Podcast: Oleg Shilovitsky Discusses PLM News and Trends at Aras and Autodesk
The last time SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale spoke with PLM expert Oleg Shilovitsky, they discussed the difficulty of BOMs across engineering disciplines and across the product lifecycle. Here is their next discussion on the latest PLM news and trends...
The Difference Between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment
In my previous article, I define and compare the two software development practices of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. The two practices are complementary and potentially overlapping, but at least their names give us the hint that they are distinct. If...
Electric Flow Feature Highlight: Environment Reservations for Confident Deployments
Deploying modern software applications is a complex process involving many moving parts. Adding microservices into the mix amplifies this problem by further decentralizing applications, resulting in more deployment endpoints to track. With all those IP addresses...
Our Top Technology Stories in 2017 and 2018 Industry Predictions
SPK wants to wish our growing subscriber community a Happy New Year! We’re honored to be welcomed onto your desktops and smartphones to share stories on how to make your engineering team and company work more efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, we hope any...









