A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

From Design Collaboration to CAD Social Tools

From Design Collaboration to CAD Social Tools
Oleg
Oleg
15 August, 2012 | 2 min for reading

Social is a magic word many people use nowadays. After social networks “grand-success”, many people in PLM industry are thinking how to apply the power of “social” to improve existing PDM and PLM. The topic that asked by most of the people is how to improve collaboration by applying some of know best practice developed by social networking.

AutoCAD Design Feed

I’ve been reading announcement made by Autodesk about AutoCAD WS Design Feed. Navigate to the following blog post to learn more. I found it quite interesting. Discussion feed became very popular tool in social collaboration. We can see examples of discussion threads in tools like Facebook and Twitter. Similar tools (but in the context of enterprise and business) are available in tools like Yammer and Salesforce.com, etc.

The idea of Design Feed is exactly that. Here is how it explained in AutoCAD WS Blog: Using the Design Feed you can attach a post to a specific point or area in your drawing to draw attention to a feature of your design and encourage discussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=QFy14vCZmO0

What I especially like in this tool is the idea of “context”. You can select a point of interest in the drawing such as entity or space area. Context makes the conversation powerful.

Design Collaboration Origins

“Collaboration” word is a tricky in PDM / PLM business. Companies really overused the purpose and meaning of what collaboration does. To me, collaboration was always the ability of people to work together. One of the earlier examples of design collaboration was presented by Dassault Systems in 3DLive back in 2006. Watch the following video for more details.

Pay attention how different people can collaborate on the context of 3D model. You can find a lot of similarities with “social discussion” tools.

“Design discussion” Origins

Another interesting example from the earlier days of social tools for CAD designers related to Vuuch. One of the early ideas of Vuuch is so-called design discussions or Facebook for files allowed to engineers and other people to create a “discussion” in the context of a specific CAD file. View Vuuch video that was made couple of years ago presenting this feature.

What is my conclusion? The value of marketing flyers and buzzwords is decreasing these days. It less matter to people how you call the tool. How to get a job done? Engineers and other people in a company are trying to answer to this question. I can see how social paradigm plays in collaborative and social tools. To provide  context driven simple user experience seems to me a key. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
25 February, 2024

In the evolving landscape of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) implementations, Project Management and document management,...

26 January, 2011

This week SolidWorks presents the new product SolidWorks n!Fuze. The actual presentation didn’t happen yet. Today is the 3rd day...

30 July, 2023

You cannot modern products using outdated and old technologies. Designing and building products is a complex process and you better...

2 January, 2015

Happy New Year! This is my first post in 2015. Internet is overloaded with new things, trends and New Year...

18 February, 2023

I’m continuing to digest what I learned earlier this week at Dassault Systemes 3D Experience World 2023 in Nashville, TN....

30 October, 2015

Note – don’t try to Google for “configustamization”. There is no such word. I checked it already :). Few weeks...

7 January, 2010

For the long period of time CAD/CAE/PDM/PLM were recognized as tools for product development and manufacturing. However, modern trends, moving...

5 May, 2024

I wrote an article about 5 Opportunities and 5 Obstacles in Engineering Digital Transformation. In the article I shared my...

21 April, 2010

Customization is a topic in Product Lifecycle Management that always raises discussions. There are multiple aspects related to customization of PLM...

Blogroll

To the top