Let me ask you a very silly question? How many times you abandoned you official company policy for data sharing and shared your files via Google, Dropbox or other services? Well, you don’t need to answer… I’m sure you did at least once. The amount of services helping us to share files online (cloud sharing) is growing. They compete by providing a different set of features, additional free storage or unmatched usability and simplicity. Last week Dropbox made an announcement of Dropbox for Teams introducing a new storage capacity (1TB) and new way of billing for companies. Here is the announcement – Dropbox Gets More Business Like. It made me think again about what does it mean for engineers and people in manufacturing companies.
Online Storage Experience?
I’m not pretending to mention all providers of online storage. My personal usage is limited on a daily basis to Google and Dropbox. However, I made a try of few other services as well.
DropBox For Teams
Dropbox originally came with their super simplicity. It was easy to set up and start using. I still believe it is so and use this service occasionally for different purposes. To sync data between my laptop and iPad is one of them.
Box.net
I think box.net has a larger set of features when it comes to collaboration and team usage. However, compared to Dropbox they provide less storage for the same price
SugarSync
I found SugarSync service is nice, worked well with most of computers /systems I tried. Folders sharing feature is cool. Another interesting solution – integration into Outlook is also can be valuable for business users.
Minus
The Minus service is probably less known among others. I specially liked they level of how easy you can start using it as well as share files.
CAD Online Collaboration Services
CAD companies are thinking how to introduce their online services too. In the beginning of this year, SolidWorks introduced n!Fuze for SolidWorks. Last month, Autodesk introduced their new Autodesk Documents cloud services too. The obvious advantage of these tools is included connection to CAD content and additional viewing capabilities.
What is my conclusion? Drop Box for Team as well as other tools are cool and affordable. However, will it compete with specialized services such as Autodesk Cloud,n!Fuze for SolidWorks and some others? I don’t think so, for the moment. Their feature list is too narrow for CAD files. However, here is the thing. I definitely can recommend CAD vendors to learn how all these services are designing their user experience. It will allow to improve usability of specialized CAD-oriented services. What CAD vendors can learn – usability, usability, usability. In my view, very important. Just my thoughts…
Collaboration is an important thing. I think you agree with me. However, speaking about collaboration how many of you are looking how to collaborate and discuss things using whiteboards? I think there are many things that just need whiteboard for an appropriate planning and thinking processes. I recently was reading Robert Scoble Gets Demo of eBeam solution from Luidia. Spend 15 minutes of your time and take a look.
What is my take? Frankly, I’m not a big fan of whiteboard. The main reason – I’m paperless. When I’m using whiteboard, I need to take care and capture it with my iPhone or digital camera. However, working with many people remotely, such a device can provide a significant improvement to engineering teams located in multiple places. Just my thoughts…
I think the world around us is about to change. A couple of weeks ago I posted PLM and Future Competition. The existing traditional structures of vendors, domains and applications are changing faster than we can expect, in my view. Collaboration was one of the fields enterprise software and vendors in CAD/PLM domain were dealing for a long time. Frankly, I have never been excited much about the “PLM collaboration” offering. In my view, it is very complicated. Consumer oriented brands and lately companies like Google and some other did a better job in this domain.
I learned yesterday about an interesting acquisition – Cisco buys collaboration startup Versly. Versly was a small startup focused on collaboration inside Microsoft Office environment. Take a look on the following video showing one of the earlier Versly demos:
Navigate your browser to the following link on Cicso website to read more about this acquisition. I found the following passage interesting:
Collaboration is one of Cisco’s five company priorities and represents what Cisco believes to be a total addressable market of 45 billion. The acquisition will provide more opportunity for Cisco partners to provide enhanced collaboration solutions to customers. Versly’s software will be integrated into a variety of Cisco’s collaboration offerings including Cisco Quad, Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx. For example, users will be able to receive automatic notifications within Cisco Quad when the content of a document has changed, escalate from simply reviewing a document to an instant messaging session through Cisco Jabber, or initiate a web conferencing session from a presentation through Cisco WebEx.
What is my take? I think PDM vendors need to take a note. Why? Hardware vendors are stepping into software water. The example of Cisco is a good one. I cannot imagine how most of the manufacturing organizations can live without MS Office documents. People in product development, manufacturing and supply chain are spending lots of time working around Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. The Office integration becomes a vital part of any PDM/PLM related environment. One of the challenges in front of PLM vendors is how to expand downstream. It is a vital part of PLM growth plan. However, existing vendors can find Cisco eating PLM collaboration lunch… Just my opinion, of course. YMMV.
Think about enterprise software and collaboration. I think, collaboration is boring. It is complicated, requires lots of system configuration and implementation skills. Try to talk to your colleagues engineers about a potential new system for collaboration. How many will be listening? Probably something is wrong. What can be a new reality for “collaboration”? MenloParkPatch announces, [...]
I wanted to touch the topic of “collaboration” today. The term collaboration is very broad. Hit Google to search for “collaboration” and you will see Google counter jumps to ~240’000’000 results in 0.2 sec. The word “collaboration” has lots of meaning. Navigate your browser to the Wikipedia link about collaboration and you will see all [...]
Collaboration and SharePoint are two of my favorite topics. I’m following them for the last couple of years. In one of my very early posts on PLM Think Tank I wrote about SharePoint PLM Paradox? Microsoft SharePoint 2007 business model made it very successful. Technology was decent and I’ve seen many customers and business partners are [...]
Do you know what is the most widely adopted PLM system in the world? You probably can guess based on the title of this blog post – Microsoft Excel. I’ve been writing about Microsoft Excel and PLM many times. PLM Excel Spreadsheets: From Odes to Woes Why Do I Like My PLM Excel Spreadsheet? Do We Need [...]
Brian Roepke of Autodesk brought my attention to Autodesk Nitrous Lab Project earlier this week. The context of this comment was about some Autodesk viewing technologies that don’t require any flash or plug-in. So, I decided to put my hands on Autodesk Project Nitrous this morning. When I’m still trying to figure out what is [...]
Do you know what is RSS? I’m pretty sure a large amount of casual internet users are not aware about what is RSS and what is RSS readers (Aggregators). I even believe there are people that using Google Reader without actually knowing they are using RSS. On the other side, RSS is a technology that [...]
Recently, I’ve been in a very interesting conversation with one of my industry buddies. It was about a role PDM and PLM systems are playing today manufacturing organizations. To summarize our discussion in few sentences, it was sounded like that: all data management systems (PDM, PLM, ERP) are used as a system of records. People [...]
Let me ask you a very silly question? How many times you abandoned you official company policy for data sharing and shared your files via Google, Dropbox or other services? Well, you don’t need to answer… I’m sure you did at least once. The amount of services helping us to share files online (cloud sharing) is growing. They compete by providing a different set of features, additional free storage or unmatched usability and simplicity. Last week Dropbox made an announcement of Dropbox for Teams introducing a new storage capacity (1TB) and new way of billing for companies. Here is the announcement – Dropbox Gets More Business Like. It made me think again about what does it mean for engineers and people in manufacturing companies.
I think the world around us is about to change. A couple of weeks ago I posted 
