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

Cloud PDM and 10GB Emails

Cloud PDM and 10GB Emails
Oleg
Oleg
28 November, 2012 | 2 min for reading

Last year I blogged about Google’s cloud and CAD/PLM readiness. Navigate to the following link to refresh your memories. The trigger for that post was Google’s announcement about personal storage scale up to 16TB. Could you imagine that number? Ask manufacturing companies about size and scale of their storage. Few of them will come even to 10TB of engineering drawing storage. My conclusion last year was that cloud infrastructure will grow. We clearly can see it now.

The following Mashable publication and Google announcement caught my attention yesterday. Here is the passage explaining what you can do.

Google announced Tuesday that it will be integrating Google Drive into Gmail, a move that will make it possible to send files up to a massive 10GB in size over email. A new button in the Gmail compose window will give users the ability to attach a file from their Google Drive account rather than attaching the file itself to the message. Once it’s attached, Gmail will ensure that your recipient has permission to view the file in your Drive account -– or will prompt you to grant that permission –- and then sends the message.

Google’s announcement made me think again about how many companies are sharing data and collaborate. File servers, Emails, Excel and file attachments is the most widely used configuration of so-called “DIY PLM”. Does it work well? I don’t think so. At the same time, for many companies this is the only affordable solution. What is IT alternative to the companies struggling to solve their data management and collaboration problem? The possible solutions are going from SharePoint and homegrown systems to basic PDM packages. None of them are perfect. Many people in the companies are sharing data using Google and Dropbox and avoiding complicated IT infrastructure.

What is my conclusion? I think, vendors need to make a note. The fundamental engineering data management problem is not resolved for many companies. People are still struggling to implement PDM and share engineering documents across the organization. Will these companies move to Google cloud tomorrow? I’m not sure about that. Will “frustrated users” try to use Google to share data between people? Possible. Most of IT infrastructure projects, including SharePoint are not ready to handle this problem yet. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
2 December, 2016

Are you familiar with famous definition of pornography used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart? Check...

17 August, 2011

Note. To be honest, I don’t have much to say with regards to the last Google purchase – Motorola. I’ve...

4 May, 2017

In the past department stores were build around the idea that consumers will come to the store for inspiration and...

19 February, 2024

In the quest for operational efficiency and innovation, the concept of simplification has emerged as a strong trend across industries....

16 May, 2021

The upfront E-zine article brought me back to my notes from Peter Schroer’s keynote at ACE2021. If you missed the...

13 June, 2014

About half year ago, I was looking for bluetooth location trackers. The solution that caught my attention was Tile. I...

4 February, 2025

Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) are essential for managing product modifications, improving quality, and ensuring compliance in manufacturing and product development....

30 December, 2017

Complex is not a good thing. Complex things are prone to break. There is a good chance complex project will...

1 January, 2016

Happy New Year to all my readers. 2015 Year was amazing and I want to thank everyone for being with...

Blogroll

To the top