Lately, I’ve seen a growing number of applications introducing the idea of real-time collaboration online on the same document. This idea is called co-editing, which I find cool, and I see a lot of large and small vendors are doing this. You can see a very interesting review of these capabilities in the following post on Mashable – 5 ways to collaborate online on documents.
Now, what about PLM? I see similar capabilities in CAD systems as very promising. I didn’t have the chance to see it presented in real systems today, but I definitely see trends that will, in the end, will make it happen.
The following technologies will allow design systems to provide online collaboration:
Cloud data management – more and more data will be easily placed on the cloud storage and retrieved without any special applications. Online applications – more and more applications are running over the internet and accessing data everywhere. Internet availability – we are living in a connected world. We’re not yet connected everywhere, but we are connected much more than in the past.
All these capabilities together will move us towards online collaboration. Today, I can point out on the DS 3DLive application and PLM 2.0 ideas. They are definitely about online applications, and I’m sure we will see more applications innovating in this space in the future.
