January 2013
January 2013 Newsletter
The premier systems engineering environment
In this issue:
- 3SL Newsletters
- Receive Your Own Newsletter
- NewsletterContents
- 3SL Website
- NeedHelp?
- Cradle Group on LinkedIn
- Do You Want Windows XP?
- Do You Want Office 2003?
- Partnership with SiemensPLM
- Source Document Coverage
- Loading Internal Document Links
- Cradle on Linux
- Displaying Diagrams in Web Browsers
- AcrobatCompatibility
- Mixed Office Installations
- Old Versionsof Cradle
3SL Newsletters
These newsletters describe 3SL’s products and services, contain news announcements from 3SL, and discuss topics in Requirements Management and Systems Engineering.If you want to access this newsletter, or any of our previous newsletters, click here to visit the newsletter archive in the 3SL website.
The newsletters are available in three forms:
- A full version with screen shots and graphics that can be downloaded from our website
- A set of web pages in our website, one page for each section of the newsletter
- A text-only version sent by e-mail with a contents list containing links to summaries of each section of the newsletter that contain More… links to that section’s web page in our website. At the top of these e-mails are links to the full version of the newsletter so that you can easily download it directly from the e-mail.
Receive Your Own Newsletter
If you have received this newsletter from someone else, or you know someone who would also like to receive it, then please click here to add an e-mail address to our list!Newsletter Contents
If you have any questions that you would like us to answer, or any Cradle, requirements management or systems engineering topics that you would like us to discuss in these newsletters, click here and send us an e-mail!You can access our newsletter archive by clicking here.
Please note that you can search our newsletter archive from our website. So if you cannot find what you want from the Cradle help, then you may find it described as a topic in one of our newsletters!
3SL Website
Our website contains links to Cradle manuals, downloads, references and on-line support. It is your first point of contact with 3SL. Bookmark the site and visit regularly. Visit and create a login account now!You can track calls that you or your colleagues log with us from your login account if it is a customer account. You can log new support calls if your account is a site representative account. To set your account, e-mail 3SL Support at or:
- If you need help creating a login account, or want more information, click here
- To be set as a customer, create an account, send an e-mail to 3SL Support by clickinghere, and be sure to tell us your login username
- To be set as a site representative, create an account, send an e-mail to 3SL Support by clicking here, and be sure to tell us your login username
Need Help?
If you have any problems with your Cradle system or evaluation we want to hear from you! Please send an e-mail to our support team () by clicking here.We can provide support directly to your desktop with a webinar. All you need is a PC with a web browser and Internet access.
If you have a problem, we can display one of our Cradle systems directly onto your PC, or your Cradle system onto our PC (if you allow it). You can show us the problem, and we will show you how to fix it!
We can create these webinars almost immediately, at any time, so do not struggle with a problem, contact us and we can solve it together!
Cradle Group on LinkedIn
LinkedIn(see is a popular social networking site for professionals in many disciplines, including systems engineering. Many of you may already be members of LinkedIn and can attest to the benefits of membership. It is free to join. Once you join, you can create connections to other people, exchange ideas and messages with them and tell people what you are doing. The more detail you add into your LinkedIn profile, the more connections LinkedIn can suggest for you.One of the featuresof LinkedIn isitsuser groups. There are thousands of groups in a wide variety of topics. Some groups are openso that anyone can join them immediately, whilst others will only admit you after approval.
3SL has created a Cradle group on LinkedIn. The group is called:Cradle – RM/SE Tool from 3SL.
We would be delighted if you joined this group. We would also be delighted if you encourage your colleagues to join this group as well! All applications to the group will be subject to the approval of 3SL.
To find the group on LinkedIn:
- Select Groups → Group Directory
- Search to find the Cradle group (it is a Corporate group), for example:
- Click on Join Group next to the Cradle group (not shown above)
- To provide a means for 3SL to make announcements to interested people
- To allow you to share Cradle-related ideas and experiences with each other
- To allow you to suggest ideas to 3SL in a forum that other users can contribute to as well
- To allow 3SL to seek opinions from a sample of our users, such as our ideas for new Cradle functionality
- Contacting your supplier if you did not purchase your Cradle system from 3SL
- By e-mail to
- By logging a support call through our website (for which your login account must be marked as a site representative). To have your login account upgraded to be a site representative, please send an e-mail to 3SL Support by clicking here, and be sure to tell us your login username
- By telephone to either our UK office on: +44 (0) 1229 838867 or our US office on: +1 (1) 256 971 9500
- By fax to either our UK office on: +44 (0) 1229 870096 or our US office on: +1 (1) 256 971 9800
Do You Want Windows XP?
We are interested to know how long our Cradle customers plan to continue to use Windows XP. So, if you use Windows XP, please tell us:- How long do you intend to continue to use it?
- What operating system do you plan to migrate to when / if you decide to leave Windows XP?
Please click here to send us an e-mail.
Do You Want Office 2003?
We are interested to know how long our Cradle customers plan to continue to use Office 2003. So, if you use Office 2003, please tell us:- How long do you intend to continue to use it?
- What Office version do you plan to migrate to when / if you decide to leave Office 2003?
Please click here to send us an e-mail.
Partnership with Siemens PLM
3SL is pleased to announce that we have entered a partnership with Siemens PLM. You can see more details here.Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software. PLM is the platform for turning more ideas into successful products because only PLM can provide the application depth and breadth needed to digitally author, validate and manage the detailed product and process data necessary to support continuous innovation.
3SL and Siemens PLM will begin to work together to develop integration technologies between 3SL’s Cradle systems engineering environment and the Siemens PLM Teamcenter suite of enterprise-class product design and manufacturing products.
More information about Siemens PLM’s product lifecycle management (PLM) products can be found here.
Source Document Coverage
Most projects start from, or use, information in external documents. Typically such documents will contain user requirements, business requirements, Governmental or industry standards or operational concepts.Sometimes, it is enough to include a simple reference to the document from the information that is being created by the project. Often, however, the project needs to be able to link to individual sections, paragraphs, table rows or table cells in the external documents. In such cases, the document must be split into its individual elements and each element loaded into its own, individual, item in a Cradle database. Once loaded, these items can be modified in a controlled way or, most often, the items are linked to other information created by the project, to provide traceability and to demonstrate compliance.In Cradle, documents that are treated in this way are called source documents.
The most commonexamples of source documents are customer requests for quotations (RFQs) and invitations to tender (ITTs).A project will load these documentsso that it can create responses to all relevant sections in each of them, and then demonstrate that these responses collectively satisfy the needs of the ITT.
When doing this, it is important for the supplier to demonstrate to the customer:
- Which parts of the customer’s documents have been loaded
- Which item in the database corresponds to each element of the document
- That the items loaded from the document have not been changed, so that each item is still exactly the same as its source paragraph or table cell in the external document
In this scenario, it is important for the supplier to demonstrate to the customer:
- Which parts of the customer’s documents have been loaded
- Which item in the database corresponds to each element of the document
- Exactly how have the items loaded from the document been changed from the original text in its source paragraph or table cell in the external document
Document Loader
Cradle allows any number of source documents to be loaded into a database using the Document Loader tool.Loading a source document into Cradle has several effects:
- A copy of the source document is stored in the database where it is protected from changes
- A collection of database items are created, one for each source document element (paragraphs, table rows and so on) that has been captured
- These items are linked by cross references into a hierarchy to reproduce the hierarchical structure of the sections and subsections in the document
- Each item is linked by a cross reference to its original source document element
- Automatically find the differences between each version of each source document
- Create a record of which items were captured from each version of each source document
Document Coverage
New coverage features have been added that are all intended to provide greater insight into the coverage of a source document, that is, to show how the items currently in the database correspond to the source document from which they were originally captured.These new features are:
- Show which part(s) of a source document have been captured
- Show which item in the database corresponds to each part of a captured document
- Show the differences between the original source document and the current contents of the database items loaded from that document
- Select a version of a source document, for example in the Project sidebar:
- Select External Document Coverage from the Item pull-down menu or the right click pop-up menu:
to display the External Document Coverage dialog:
In the simplest case, simply select OK in the dialog and the selected source document version will be opened in Word, with highlighting to show the parts of the source document that have been captured into Cradle:
so that anything shown with background highlighting has been captured into the database. In this example, the list of tables has not been captured, but sections 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2 and 2.1 can all be seen to have been captured into the database.
As a visual aid, this is very helpful. It is a simple matter to either display this to the customer or to print it and send it to the customer as proof of their question “Which parts of our documents have been loaded?” in the previous section.
If you select the Show items captured from original document checkbox in the External Document Coverage dialog and select OK, then in the Word session, in addition to showing which parts of the document have been captured, Cradle also shows precisely which item in the database contains each part of the document:
In this example, section 1.2 System Overview, can be seen to have been captured into the database item UR-4 System Overview.
As a visual aid, this is very helpful. It is a simple matter to either display this to the customer or to print it and send it to the customer as proof of their questions “Which parts of our documents have been loaded?” and “Which item in your database corresponds to each element of our document?” in the previous section.
As previously discussed, in general no changes are made to the items loaded from source documents. Your customers may want to see evidence that once their data has been loaded from their documents (which they trust because they wrote them) into your Cradle database (which they do not trust because it is not under their control), that their data has not been changed in any way.
The new source document coverage features can solve this problem as well.
If a change is made to one of the captured items, for example to the item UR-4 System Overview:
Then if you select the Compare original document against current database items checkbox in the External Document Coverage dialog and select OK, then in the Word session Cradle will compare the text that is in the original source document (a copy of which exists in the database) and the content of the database item that contains that text, for every part of the document that has been captured:
So in this example, the Word session shows that the original source document text for section 1.2 has been changed in the Cradle database item that corresponds to this paragraph.
As a commercial aid, the importance of this facility cannot be over-emphasised. This is VERY important! This one feature can save you and your customer hours of compliance work, by proving that the starting point for all of your traceability and compliance to their RFQ or ITT is valid.
That is, this feature proves that the information that you loaded from the RFQ or ITT has not been changed and therefore everything that follows in your work is based on completely accurate information.
So this feature addresses the question “How can we be assured that your response to our ITT is accurate, that you have not changed any of our commercial and technical requirements?”in the previous section.
This proof can be presented in an even more convincing format. If you select both checkboxes in the External Document Coverage dialog and select OK, then in the Word session, in addition to showing which parts of the document have been captured and the database items into which they have been captured, Cradle will also compare the text that is in the original source document (a copy of which exists in the database) and the content of the database item that contains that text, for every part of the document that has been captured:
This is the most powerful source document coverage view that Cradle can generate. As a commercial and technical aid, we believe that it will be invaluable and will save enormous amounts of time during compliance audits.
This view answers all of the customer’s most fundamental compliance questions:
- “Which parts of our documents have been loaded?”
- “Which item in your database corresponds to each element of our document?”
- “How can we be assured that your response to our ITT is accurate, that you have not changed any of our commercial and technical requirements?”
Loading Internal Document Links