The first website for the Mathcad Calculation Server (formerly Mathcad Application Server) for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry in Switzerland is set up at an Institute from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. The Institute focuses on applications for the AEC industry. We started a project with a customer working in the timber construction field. He wanted to be able to share his Mathcad worksheets with his own customers for supporting them in decision making and calculation support.

The Mathcad Calculation Server allows each company to post Mathcad worksheets so that their customers can fill in interactive math calculation forms without having to know or own Mathcad. The design engineers can provide these Web forms to their customers without having to know HTML.

Here’s a HTML version of a Mathcad worksheet as it appears on our Mathcad Calculation Server site. The customer just fills in the web forms, then the Calculation Server recalculates the Mathcad worksheets and provides an updated results for the customer.

 
The worksheets on our Server can be locked (yellow) or unlocked (white).  

The sharing of Mathcad worksheets is actually the goal of the Calculation Server, but we wanted to go a step further to share the whole server for more than one customer and sell the server power in order to be able to provide reasonably priced access to Mathcad worksheets. The customers manage their worksheets and users themselves to reduce the administration that has to be done by us.

We evaluated the former Mathcad Application Server and found it to be the right tool to achieve this functionality. It needed much maintenance from the server administrator such as uploading worksheets and creation of a Windows user. That's why we built a web-application on top of the Calculation Server that wraps the Mathcad files.

Features of our Web application include: 

• Upload of worksheets from Web form upload
• Upload of a description for each worksheet (in PDF)
• Creation of user (with optional expire date)
• Optional password protection of a worksheet
• Setup of a disclaimer message shown the first time an end user accesses a worksheet
• Categorization of worksheets
• Searching for worksheets
  

14Ds Mathcad Calculation Server

Feel free to see it in action as well as some of the Mathcad worksheets
posted at i4Ds Mathcad Application Server. The worksheets with the white keys next to them are unlocked and available to be viewed.

Was this article interesting? Let us know.