DriveWorks Live Tradeoffs

If you’re an administrator of DriveWorks live, you may not know that there are two ways to deploy your projects so that they are available in the browser. You can either use the DriveWorks Live Application or you can use Internet Information Service (IIS).

There are a couple of tradeoffs to which one you use. If you use the DriveWorks Live Application, you have to be sure to always have the application start on whatever server you are using. As IIS is a service, it is setup by design to start upon boot. 

Why would you ever use the application instead of IIS? There are a couple of negatives here. Not that you can’t work around them, but they are negatives none-the-less. First, you now have one more point of failure in the chain of your integration that could potentially be the source of your headaches. I have also noticed that the interface for IIS can be pretty daunting for someone who is just starting out in software development from the engineering side of things. DriveWorks documentation is certainly helpful in getting things setup in that respect, but as each environment and network has its differences and oddities, this can make debugging more difficult. The last major negative is that Live as a service can’t process documents like excel and word. That being the case, you would have to hand the documents off to Autopilot to process. Not a huge hurdle if you already have Autopilot setup and running, but a potential deal-breaker if you don’t and you don’t have the budget to purchase it.

DriveWorks Live is a great solution to deploy internally to your team. Licensing is cheaper for your users; you don’t have to worry about end user software updates, and this is the next step in marching towards a user facing solution. Whether you’re just getting started with DriveWorks Live or you’re ready to take that next step, we can help you get your implementation on the right track from the beginning.