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VirtualForge Toolbox

The VirtualForge Toolbox is Endeavor Engineering's presence inside the environment you already work in — where you reach the VirtualForge capabilities you own, and where VirtualForge reaches you.

Seeq is its first home. A Tool you gain arrives alongside your existing signals and worksheets rather than in yet another application you have to remember to open.

Status: in rebuild — a near-term priority. An early version of the Toolbox shipped and was used: a Seeq add-on, deployed to a small number of users, and the way Plot Digitizer was reached inside Seeq. We deliberately stopped developing it rather than extending a proof of concept, and are rebuilding it from the ground up. The design is settled; implementation of the new version has not started, and it is targeted for release within the next year. Plot Digitizer returns with it. To digitize a plot in Seeq in the meantime, Seeq's own Plot Digitizer add-on is in the Seeq Add-on Manager.

Why we stopped instead of continuing

The first Toolbox was built by hand, quickly, to prove a specific point — that a purpose-built Tool could be delivered into Seeq and be genuinely useful there. It proved it. It also accumulated the shortcuts a proof of concept always accumulates, and it was built on the assumption of a separate project per host environment, which does not survive the second host.

We could have kept extending it. Choosing not to was the more expensive decision in the short term and the cheaper one over any horizon that matters: a storefront is the surface customers touch most, and shipping a permanent version of a temporary design would have been a decision we could not walk back.

The rebuild is a genuine ground-up effort — AI-assisted development against fully expressed engineering methodology, which is how a company our size delivers at a pace that would otherwise be implausible. The same approach is why our connectors carry Connectors ++ rather than one-off implementations.

What it is for

More than a catalog. The Toolbox is three things at once:

  • A storefront. See the Tools entitled to you, discover what else exists, and put them to work without leaving the host application.
  • A messaging point. Notifications and interactions from VirtualForge arrive where you are working, rather than in an email you will archive.
  • A feedback channel. A direct route back to us from inside the product. Tool ideas are genuinely welcome, and the early version carried a feedback form for exactly this reason.

Taken together it is EEI's and VirtualForge's presence in your environment — not a page you visit, but a place we are.

Working on your behalf

The Toolbox is also the user-authenticated, host-side endpoint that lets VirtualForge do work in that host for you. That is a deliberate design choice with a practical consequence: the platform acts under your permissions, in your environment, rather than asking you to move data out to somewhere it has access. It is the same instinct as connect, don't duplicate, applied to authority instead of data.

Democratizing purpose-built Tools

The reason a storefront matters more than it sounds: it changes what a capability costs to obtain.

Organize a set of Tools around a use case and deliver them through one familiar surface, and something that used to require a custom project becomes something you can simply be granted access to. That is the difference between a capability existing and a capability being available to you.

It also fixes a quieter problem. A Tool you own and cannot find is worth approximately nothing, and once a portfolio grows past a handful of items, "ask the vendor what we have" stops being an acceptable answer.

One core, many environments

The new Toolbox is a host-agnostic core — tool catalog, entitlements, feedback, launch orchestration — expressed into each host environment through an adapter, rather than rebuilt per host.

Seeq is where we are focused, and the Seeq expression is the one being built. The same pattern applies to other host environments; that is a direction, not a commitment.

Tools it will deliver

Tool What it does Status
Plot Digitizer Turn a curve trapped in an image into data in Seeq, managed with the asset it describes In rebuild, returning with the Toolbox
Seeq Export Move data that lives in Seeq out to another store — promoting Seeq-accessible data into your enterprise historian, or transitioning off a custom push connector onto something supported Planned
Seeq Asset Sync Keep Seeq asset-tree relationships synchronized with the systems that define them Planned
Autonomic Maintenance Drive maintenance from a Seeq condition: when it becomes true, a job is scheduled and executed through your ERP, with status flowing back into Seeq Available as a custom integration — works with SAP today

Seeq connectors are a separate product line rather than Toolbox Tools, but the Toolbox is where you will discover them.

If one of these fits a need you have now, tell us. Early conversations shape what gets built first, and several of these exist today as collaborations rather than catalog items.