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

PLM problem with mail – final sentence?

PLM problem with mail – final sentence?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
30 July, 2009 | 3 min for reading

There are numerous ways in which people changed way they communicate for the last decades. Email is definitely one of them. Email came to our life in the end of 80s last century and fundamentally changed communication between people and social groups. Despite significant challenges, email brings huge rational in the way people communicate. Email becomes very popular also in business eco-system. These days you almost cannot imagine organization working without an email system. Email resolved lots of communication and logistical problem between people working in different departments and locations.

At the same time email brings a lot of challenges. Email overflow, tracking of mails, threads – these are the most significant email challenges that comes together with email when you apply it in the space of business collaboration. Product Lifecycle Management is not exclusion in this business collaboration. PLM is heavily relies on collaboration and communication and therefore question of email came very soon to the level of how PLM need to re-use, ignore or improve email capabilities. So far, PLM, in my view, have long love and hate relationships with email systems. From side of the advantages, email can significantly improve communication of people as part of collaborative business processes proposed by PLM systems. From the other side, complexity of email communication kills and people stack in the end with inability to resolve email overflow and other peoples.

There are few interesting trends and examples I see in how companies use (or ignore) email systems. Some of them I’d like to discuss more in deep.

Unified communication concept and SharePoint

Micorsoft takes unified communication as an extreme version of messaging and collaboration between people. By enabling multiple ways to communicate, Microsoft breaks email communication into pieces and allows people not to be locked in their communication on email only. SharePoint makes future, even deeper, step in messaging and mail collaboration by allowing to post mail (message) to folders and workspaces in SharePoint. Combined with Unified communication it creates interesting environment for collaboration. Main disadvantage in  my view is removal of “single focal point”, which significant point of success for current mail-based collaboration.

plm-mail-sharepoint-mail

3DLive Collaborative Environment

Dassault Systems introduced new collaborative environment (3DLive) about 2 years ago. This tool (as well as future coming V6 capabilities) provides people with capability to work directly with people and eliminate email communication. With his own pros and cons, this is very interesting approach.

plm-mail-DS-3DLive

Google Wave

Redefine email. This is Google Wave mission. By focusing on two most significant pains with regards to email – collaborative work and structured messages, Google Wave predicts change in the way people communicate today. This is still in the future.

plm-mail-google-wave

At the same time, there are quite many examples of tools and systems lately introduced on the market that focuses on pain relief for disappointed email users. I’d like to feature two of them – Vuuch and ShareFlow.

Vuuch, a new “design discussion” tool, is focusing on how possible to bring relevant context into discussion between designers and engineers and, by doing that, improve way for designer and engineers will communicate. Significant advantage of Vuuch, as I see them, will be eliminating  need to follow complicated email threads. I see it as very interesting experiment and innovative development.

plm-mail-vuuch

ShareFlow from Zenbe, this is another example of “follow email pain” strategy. Their value proposition came from the point where to use email is next to impossible. ShareFlow product is promoted to become email problem solver.

plm-mail-shareflow

I understand that it’s almost impossible to cover all possible and impossible combinations of mail usage and also solutions. I’d not be able to cover all. I’m looking forward to your questions and discussions.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
26 December, 2023

It’s time to ask yourself: is Excel holding your organization back? Over the last few years, I’ve been talking to...

9 May, 2016

I was catching up on news during the weekend. One of the articles in Boston Globes caught my attention –...

15 December, 2010

The conversations about future CAD and PLM solutions is not a new thing these days. I decided to re-read some...

25 March, 2014

If you are not familiar with the term “Shadow IT”, you better do. The term is not completely new. Wikipedia...

3 May, 2011

One of my blog readers asked me few questions about managing of effectivity. I decided to share this information. In...

2 January, 2015

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

10 December, 2014

Cloud PLM is a trending topic among software vendors these days. As I mentioned earlier in my post, the question...

30 June, 2024

The debates about PLM and ERP about management of Bill of Materials are heating up. Recent years were remarkable with...

5 August, 2010

Six months ago, I posted “Collaboration Trends or Why I Stopped Using Google Wave?“. After Google’s announcement about Google Wave termination...

Blogroll

To the top