Article: At your service

With the Mathcad Application Server, interfaces to Mathcad documents built as HTML form fields are stored on a server, and users can view and interact with them without having Mathcad on their own PC. JACQUI CHESWICK explains.

With its enormous existing user base of individuals within industry, Mathcad has been well-placed to be chosen as one of the key tools which large organisations are employing to capture and share the knowledge of their staff. Mathcad’s development has been focusing on its collaborative aspects for a long while now, culminating in the recent launch of Mathcad 11’s Enterprise edition.

Mathcad has had excellent publishing abilities for some time now, due to its self-documenting nature. Organisations have been able to publish Mathcad worksheets for webserver posting, and with Mathcad 11 Mathsoft also added new capabilities for converting Mathcad documents to familiar RTF format as another alternative to communicating and sharing documents.

The latest development is the Mathcad Application Server. With this arrangement, the interfaces to Mathcad documents built as HTML form fields are stored on a server, and users can view and interact with them without having Mathcad on their own PC.

In an enterprise-wide situation, you’ll be able to see what this means immediately. Worksheets can be created representing complete pre-built applications, and presented to users elsewhere as a browser form which can accept inputs. The web server acknowledges the request, processes the calculations, and delivers the results as an HTML page. Users can recalculate documents as many times as desired in
a session.

There are many appealing aspects of this arrangement. Re-using common calculations in Mathcad worksheets reduces development time and calculation errors, but the user needs little to no experience of Mathcad. There are very low requirements on the user’s PC, which helps with maintenance costs to add to the reduction in software expenditure. And because Mathcad Application Server is built on Internet Information Services (IIS), system administrators have full control over security and access to the web server.

Mathcad Application Server is yet another element in the drive to make Mathcad the complete enterprise-wide core engineering software application, bringing the knowledge of the entire organisation together. In some companies, the knowhow captured in Mathcad worksheets is valuable enough that they have built repositories, custom connections to engineering data banks, or special user interfaces to allow widespread access to Mathcad-based applications. These companies have already created systems to manage and deploy proprietary applied mathematical knowledge. Mathcad 11 Enterprise now offers these capabilities within the product.

Mathcad 11 Enterprise supplies licensing and support services aimed at providing corporations with a platform for calculation management. Integrated with the new Microsoft SharePoint portal server, Mathcad 11 worksheets can be archived, versioned, and published to intranets and extranets, with full access control. Moving forward, new products and enhancements will be offered on the Mathcad 11/SharePoint platform, to provide out-of-the-box enterprise features that once required custom integration.

Using Mathcad 11 Enterprise for calculation management in an organisation will pay for itself many
times over in a short period of time by reducing errors, encouraging re-use, and propagating engineering solutions and expertise company-wide, for further verification and improvement. As one engineering manager told us, “If our company retained even half the knowledge that our engineers have, we would be a lot more competitive.”

What is the new Mathcad Application Server likely to be used for?

• Performing reiterative calculations, using different inputs in “what-if?” scenarios;
• Performing standard pro-forma calculations to be re-used in multiple projects;
• Enabling inexperienced Mathcad users to perform quick calculations;
• Deploying interactive example problems for online or distance learning;
• Building specialised websites with customised calculations;
• Distributing Mathcad worksheets with restricted user access to the underlying calculations or formulae

Capturing the collective experience
Time to market, product innovation, and quality are functions of a company’s engineering expertise - how it is applied, and how it is continuously improved. In an engineered product, the curve of a wing, thickness of a wire, or torque of a motor will each result from detailed analysis. A company wishing to remain competitive will try to capture the collective experience gained during this process to apply to future projects, reducing the risk of catastrophic product failure.

You could imagine a system in which every thought, brainstorm, and judgment made by engineering staff could be captured and managed in an online environment, providing a complete product design rationale. While we don’t believe this will happen very soon, we do know that tremendous value can be realised by careful management and documentation of engineering analyses - and this can be accomplished today with Mathcad 11 Enterprise.