Dropbox Webhooks and Cloud PDM Pivoting

Regardless on what CAD and PDM vendors want, engineers are going to share files on Dropbox and similar file sharing services (Google Drive, One Drive, etc.)  Do you remember my PLM cloud concerns and Dropbox reality for engineers  post two years ago? 34% of people in engineering departments are using Dropbox to share data. I don’t know what is the number now, but my hunch – it is not going down.

I’ve been reading about interesting functionality added to Dropbox- Webhooks. Navigate to the following Computerworld article to read more – Dropbox plays more nicely with Web apps. The following passage explains what service does:

Web developers can now configure apps to be notified immediately of changes that users make to their Dropbox files, taking some strain off Web servers and potentially giving end users a better experience. The functionality comes via a new “webhooks” API (application programming interface) for Dropbox, which lets developers set up real-time notifications for their Web apps whenever users modify a Dropbox file.

More explanations can be found in Dropbox blog – Announcing Dropbox webhooks:

In general, a webhook is a way for an app developer to specify a URI to receive notifications based on some trigger. In the case of Dropbox, notifications get sent to your webhook URI every time a user of your app makes a file change. The payload of the webhook is a list of user IDs who have changes. Your app can then use the standard delta method to see what changed and respond accordingly.

You can ask me how is that related to cloud PDM? Good question. In my view, this particular piece of Dropbox technology can simplify development of any cloud PDM system. Dropbox developed reference application in the tutorial. Another product referenced in the announcement is Picturelife. Simplify – doesn’t mean cloud PDM will ultimately relies on Dropbox. Many companies don’t want to put their data on Dropbox. Maybe your remember my blog post – How to evaluate PDM before it will ruin your personal productivity? Here is the thing – for most of cloud PDM developers, user experience is the biggest issue. Dropbox is an ideal environment to kick off your cloud PDM development experiments. The majority of companies that not using PDM these days are using Dropbox. For these users cloud PDM on top of Dropbox can be “no brainier”. Later on, additional infrastructure can be build and used.

What is my conclusion? To get user traction is priceless. It requires lots of UX pivoting. To find right experience is one of the most critical first steps. Future technologies can be improved and fixed. There are many open web infrastructure these days that can be used to build enterprise products (including PDM). Startup companies can pivot and experiment with user experience with Dropbox based cloud PDM… Actually, established vendors can do the same. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

picture credit http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/