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

From Design Collaboration to CAD Social Tools

From Design Collaboration to CAD Social Tools
Oleg
Oleg
15 August, 2012 | 2 min for reading

Social is a magic word many people use nowadays. After social networks “grand-success”, many people in PLM industry are thinking how to apply the power of “social” to improve existing PDM and PLM. The topic that asked by most of the people is how to improve collaboration by applying some of know best practice developed by social networking.

AutoCAD Design Feed

I’ve been reading announcement made by Autodesk about AutoCAD WS Design Feed. Navigate to the following blog post to learn more. I found it quite interesting. Discussion feed became very popular tool in social collaboration. We can see examples of discussion threads in tools like Facebook and Twitter. Similar tools (but in the context of enterprise and business) are available in tools like Yammer and Salesforce.com, etc.

The idea of Design Feed is exactly that. Here is how it explained in AutoCAD WS Blog: Using the Design Feed you can attach a post to a specific point or area in your drawing to draw attention to a feature of your design and encourage discussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=QFy14vCZmO0

What I especially like in this tool is the idea of “context”. You can select a point of interest in the drawing such as entity or space area. Context makes the conversation powerful.

Design Collaboration Origins

“Collaboration” word is a tricky in PDM / PLM business. Companies really overused the purpose and meaning of what collaboration does. To me, collaboration was always the ability of people to work together. One of the earlier examples of design collaboration was presented by Dassault Systems in 3DLive back in 2006. Watch the following video for more details.

Pay attention how different people can collaborate on the context of 3D model. You can find a lot of similarities with “social discussion” tools.

“Design discussion” Origins

Another interesting example from the earlier days of social tools for CAD designers related to Vuuch. One of the early ideas of Vuuch is so-called design discussions or Facebook for files allowed to engineers and other people to create a “discussion” in the context of a specific CAD file. View Vuuch video that was made couple of years ago presenting this feature.

What is my conclusion? The value of marketing flyers and buzzwords is decreasing these days. It less matter to people how you call the tool. How to get a job done? Engineers and other people in a company are trying to answer to this question. I can see how social paradigm plays in collaborative and social tools. To provide  context driven simple user experience seems to me a key. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
20 February, 2012

I’d like to continue my “multi-CAD and PDM” story. If you had no chance to read my yesterday post The...

24 March, 2016

Collaboration is one of these magic words that often used by software vendors to explain value proposition of PDM and...

22 October, 2013

PLM for small companies is long time debated topic. The origins of PLM business are going deep into businesses of...

26 April, 2016

We are getting more connected these days. Many elements of our every day life habits and needs are moving into...

1 February, 2013

I want to continue my BOM 101 thoughts and speak about working with Bill of Materials during early stages of...

12 March, 2019

You probably noticed a growing popularity of “Digital Twin”. Check this picture below showing you Google Search trend. People are...

25 November, 2009

The Google Wave invites pushed to the community for the last 1-2 months are starting to bring some fruitful results....

6 July, 2011

The big weekend finally over and this is a time to get back on track with a long list of...

9 January, 2021

Aras is one of the companies I’m continuously following for quite a while. Alongside interesting architecture, Aras is also innovative...

Blogroll

To the top