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

PLM Collaboration and SaaS Wake-Up Call

PLM Collaboration and SaaS Wake-Up Call
Oleg
Oleg
17 January, 2011 | 2 min for reading

I read on Forrester Blog about acquisition of Dimdim by Salesforce.com. T.J. Keits of Forrester is discussing various aspects of Dimdim advantages as well as Salesforce acquisition details. Last year, I had a chance to try out Dimdim and I found the environment very convenient. The following characteristics of Dimdim mentioned as very complimentary to Salesforce’s Chatter released earlier –  tools for social collaboration. Here is the quote from T.J. Keits blog:

Dimdim’s real-time communications technology fleshes out the collaboration story Salesforce began with its social offering, Chatter, last year. This blending of tools will boost the collaborative power of some key Chatter features:

  • Profiles. On its own, this social tool is the foundation for information sharing and expertise location in an organization. Users can post information about themselves and their job and associate their profile with certain shared information in a searchable format. With added conferencing capabilities, employees can locate an individual and start a meeting with them, allowing the parties to communicate and jointly view data in real time.
  • Groups. Salesforce’s turn on team workspaces allows employees to share information and work together in a central location. Unlike a team space in SharePoint or Lotus Quickr, though, there was no integration with any tools that would allow for synchronous interaction. With the inclusion of Dimdim’s conferencing tools, information workers can now communicate within the context of the team space, allowing for real-time collaboration within a workflow.
  • File sharing. This is a recent addition to the Chatter offering, but an interesting one because it allows for content sharing within their activity stream. Of course, the real potential of this will be unlocked when the option to start a web meeting is included with that shared document, allowing a worker to start a live discussion with the individual who posted the content.

PLM, Social Collaboration and Platforms

Vendors in PLM space put a significant emphasize of “social aspects” of collaboration. Social Link of PTC, Social Innovation of Dassault and some others are best examples to present an interest of PLM vendors not to lose “social aspects”. However, none of PLM vendors didn’t decide to have a core collaborative functionality as part of their own portfolios. Most of the work PLM vendors are doing was about integration of existing collaborative features and platforms (i.e. SharePoint etc.).

What is my conclusion? Salesforce presented an interesting case related to the acquisition of platform capabilities. In my view, this is a very logical step in the future development of Saleforce’s platform. What it means for PLM? In my view, it makes Salesforce more competitive. Some of PLM vendors are thinking about their cloud / SaaS offerings. The wake-up call for owning some fundamental technologies can be too late. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
31 July, 2012

What do you think about PLM vs. ERP competition? Err… Good question, right? In my view, PLM sales people are...

27 April, 2011

I’m attending Aras Community Event 2011 these days in The Henrly Hotel in Dearborn, MI. You can have more information...

25 August, 2020

PLM is too complex and too expensive. I’ve heard it many times, especially from medium-size and small manufacturing companies. Licenses,...

13 October, 2015

I’ve been following Amazon re:invent event last week. One of the largest Amazon events is totally focused on Amazon Web Services...

7 September, 2009

Reading Vuuch post “Do Opposite Attract in Business Process?”, I decided to go future and think about opposites in PLM....

25 December, 2015

My recent article “What is wrong with PLM of Things? led me to have discussions online and offline about integration of IoT and...

30 December, 2016

Few days ago, I my attention was caught by Allan Behrens’ tweet  with a very provoking question about what changed...

3 May, 2010

Few weeks ago, I had chance to post about PLM Data Model. I think, PLM space has a real lack...

29 December, 2018

Holidays week is here and it means the traditional time to write ‘best of.. ‘, ‘top…’ and similar type of...

Blogroll

To the top