What do you think about “PLM Collaboration”?… Yes, I can hear you – boring. However, what if I tell that collaboration can be cool again? Over the past year, I was tracking few vendors investing and playing with a collaboration topic. Today I decided to give you my perspective on what I believe will re-invent “collaboration” to the degree that will allow to regular people work and love these new collaborative tools.
Easy To Get
This one is simple. Nobody wants to deal with installations these days. If you want to provide a collaborative system, please make it available online or in the way that simplifies a path to start using a tool. This is absolutely critical.
Access and Mobile
Access is one of the very important things, collaboration needs to adopt. Collaborative tools need to be available everywhere and not restricted to a particular environment, infrastructure or device. This is in the past. Nowadays, mobile and BYOD rocks the field. All together it will create a significant challenge for IT, but it is just must go this way.
Collaboration and Cool
Cool is important! Don’t make it boring. You may say cool is not important when it comes to the business. I think opposite. Even if enterprise companies are still driven by old generation people, “new influencers” become more and more visible. People want to keep the same cool devices and use the same cool systems as they use at home.
New Gen of Collaboration Tools
I’d like to share few videos related to new collaboration tools I’m following. The first one is Vuuch. The company was established back in 2009. The idea of Vuuch is to improve collaboration by social interaction. Last version of Vuuch – V5 introduced additional features that make a deeper connection to working processes. You can see a video here. My guess usability is one of the biggest topics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzatbV3N1ng
SolidWorks n!Fuze is a system to help engineers to collaborate mostly with SolidWorks files. It adopts cloud and improves connection between people and files outside of organization. It was released last year (2011). It was a flagship product for SolidWorks and use Enovia v6 cloud platform. At the same time, SolidWorks admitted many mistakes that were made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j15eOHGXlso
Autodesk Cloud. This product is kind of n!Fuze remake together with the attempt to bring easy collaboration with files. It looks a bit Googlish, but fundamentally lack of many functions. The user experience of Autodesk cloud shows that customers are more in focus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA36d-_8Sr8
TeamPlatform. This is a newest addition to my “collaboration collection”. I found the application behavior slick and nice. This system clearly taking the cool and best experience of consumer web. You can navigate here to learn more. It supports few scenarios around file collaboration, managing projects and other files. It is too early to say what TeamPlatform can do, but it looks interesting.
What is my conclusion? I think more companies will try to challenge large vendors with new type of applications leveraging cloud, mobile and other best practices. It is interesting how they will be able to find a precise scenario to interest engineers and other people in organizations to start using that. We will need to get back to this topic in few months to see trajectories of collaborations.
Best, Oleg
picture credit David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
