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

Visual WIKI – is it next step in collaborative product development?

Visual WIKI – is it next step in collaborative product development?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
12 February, 2009 | 2 min for reading

I’d like to come to raise the idea of visual WIKI. This is a possible way to make PLM more collaborative and more adaptable for users’ needs. In today’s world, PLM companies are struggling about how to deliver PLM implementation quickly and at a low cost. The traditional way – providing out-of-the-box has brought some success over the past few years. It has allowed customers who agree about the common business practice of PLM deployment to benefit from this out-of-the-box deployment. At the same time, I think the problem still remains. Although many customers are ready to start with out-of-the-box, they have additional requirements that are hard to recognize before implementation. Also, these requirements might be very unique and require customization. Normally, these customizations are done by service providers or implemented by customers.

 Getting back to the “visual wiki” idea: The core of the wiki idea is to provide technology that will make a collection of Web pages be able to have multiple participants co-edit its content. Wiki developed the WYSIWYG concept for interactive content editing. I really like it in context of Product Lifecycle Management. PLM products can allow users to create structured Wiki pages using the content of the products they are developing. In addition, we can intensively use 3D content on these pages with various lightweight 3D format representations – 3D PDF, 3DXML, JT Open, etc.

 The next powerful capability we can create is tracking and controlling changes. Since Wiki is shared content with controlled user access, we can allow particular users to create content (i.e. designers and engineers) and allow others authorization to review only. Also, since a Wiki page can aggregate content about products during their development, this page can be used to track the development maturity used by potential customers to review product capabilities, and also centralize information about potential customer claims and support requests.

 To sum up: I see Wiki as a powerful content aggregation tool  allowing collaborative access by multiple users from organizations involved in product development , and consumers as well. Wiki can also develop consumer communities around this content. There are many Wiki software options available. I will say that most of these products and technologies can be reused for PLM products. The ability wiki to adapt content to a specific customer’s need will resolve heavy customization issues in current out-of-the-box software offering.

 

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
16 January, 2012

Silicon Valley is well known by the high concentration of web start-up companies. My recent conclusion about PLM Highway (Rt....

4 February, 2017

Time is running fast. Ilan Madjar, my former SMARTEAM colleague and managing partner of xLM Solutions LLC reminded me about...

7 November, 2013

Budget and cost. These are important elements of every IT solution. PLM is not an exclusion from this list. There...

7 May, 2022

Earlier this week I sat together (virtually) with Nina Dar whom I know for many years of meeting in PLM...

4 September, 2015

Happy Friday! Summer is over and long weekend is just around the corner. A good time to try something new....

1 June, 2018

Each product has its lifecycle going from phases of introduction, growth, maturity and decline. It applies to both sides of...

24 April, 2018

I’m in Las Vegas at SuiteWorld 2018. Annual event organized by Oracle NetSuite – one of the largest cloud ERP...

30 January, 2014

The buzz about Big Data is everywhere these days. From 2011 and up today, we can clearly see skyrocketing interest in...

6 July, 2018

Growing complexity and longevity of manufacturing products are raising questions about future CAD and PLM platforms. Platform is such a...

Blogroll

To the top