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

What “social features” PLM can steal from SharePoint?

What “social features” PLM can steal from SharePoint?
Oleg
Oleg
25 November, 2013 | 2 min for reading

tag

Collaboration is still one of the hot topics in PLM space. I was watching PLM TV report about Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE Platform from Engineering.com. A bit long (my taste) video provides a comprehensive overview of what Dassault’s key execs are saying about 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the last Dassault conference. Lots of them are related to complexity of data, connecting information sources, provide better user experience especially for top tier mangers. However, “social” remained the key word in many of conversations connected to the value of 3DExperience as a “new way to collaborate”. Social was one of the key points of new DS platform innovation. This is how engineering.com captured that:

Verdi asks about the platform and architecture and also how the changes will impact product development teams. He delves into how Dassault envisions that teams will use the social and collaborative tools as part of their engineering processes.

However, very often, it is not simple to see what specific “social” features can enable a new way to collaborate. As I mentioned in my previous blog – Why Social PLM 1.0 failed, a single social utility is what most of vendors missed in their plans to deliver a new way to collaborate socially. An interesting article caught my attention few days ago – 3 Cool Things about SharePoint in Office 365 Enterprise. One of features was specifically “social oriented”. It was about simple and well-known tagging – hashtags (#) and at tags (@). I captured the following passage:

Bring social inside the walls of your organization with SharePoint’s social features. With SharePoint 2010, you could follow sites and tag colleagues. In the 2013 flavor, you can have a newsfeed where you can use social features like hashtags (#) and at tags (@) to track ideas and topics and mention people in your posts. In a news feed for a particular team, you might put hashtags on customer names, industry publication names, or create a tag for a particular issue. Then someone can just click the active tag to see all posts relative to that topic.

SharePoint cool features made me think again about “single utility” that can provide some practical sense to a new way to collaborate presented by PLM companies. Tagging feature can be quite powerful. If I combine it with the ides of data complexity, multiple data sources and user experience, we can get a complete new way to collaborate.

What is my conclusion? Social is a very powerful topic. However, most of enterprise companies lost the focus to provide a specific meaning to social features by applying the same principles companies like Facebook and Twitter empowered their own solutions. In the context of engineering, manufacturing and, probably, any enterprise organization, Facebook-like functionality is clearly not enough to change some fundamental collaboration principles. I think, SharePoint folks understood it quite well after all ups and downs SharePoint had in the past. Therefore, I can see the value of some specific features in the overall social collaboration domain. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
15 April, 2014

Collaboration is the name of the game today for many vendors. CAD and PLM vendors are included. Cloud technology is...

8 January, 2015

Services is an important part of every PLM implementation. My attention caught news article – Kalypso and GoEngineer form strategic...

20 February, 2014

Business is going global. It is not only for large manufacturing companies these days. As a result of cost pressure...

28 January, 2018

Manufacturing companies are preparing to move into digital future. Digital transformation is one of the most hot trends. And as...

14 June, 2017

I learned new cloud PLM buzzword – rehosting (re-hosting). It came from CIMdata blog about PTC cloud strategy earlier this week....

16 November, 2015

More than 10 years ago, I had a conversation with one of telecom manufacturing companies in Europe. I asked –...

10 April, 2022

Digital transformation is a hot topic in many industries, and manufacturing is no exception. Many manufacturers are looking for ways...

30 January, 2014

The buzz about Big Data is everywhere these days. From 2011 and up today, we can clearly see skyrocketing interest in...

15 October, 2011

Product development and manufacturing is very different from company to company. Therefore, I’m not surprised anymore when I see multiple...

Blogroll

To the top