CAD, New Collaboration and Online Storage Services

October 31, 2011

Let me ask you a very silly question? How many times you abandoned you official company policy for data sharing and shared your files via Google, Dropbox or other services? Well, you don’t need to answer… I’m sure you did at least once. The amount of services helping us to share files online (cloud sharing) is growing. They compete by providing a different set of features, additional free storage or unmatched usability and simplicity. Last week Dropbox made an announcement of Dropbox for Teams introducing a new storage capacity (1TB) and new way of billing for companies. Here is the announcement – Dropbox Gets More Business Like. It made me think again about what does it mean for engineers and people in manufacturing companies.

Online Storage Experience?

I’m not pretending to mention all providers of online storage. My personal usage is limited on a daily basis to Google and Dropbox. However, I made a try of few other services as well.

DropBox For Teams

Dropbox originally came with their super simplicity. It was easy to set up and start using. I still believe it is so and use this service occasionally for different purposes. To sync data between my laptop and iPad is one of them.

Box.net

I think box.net has a larger set of features when it comes to collaboration and team usage. However, compared to Dropbox they provide less storage for the same price

SugarSync

I found SugarSync service is nice, worked well with most of computers /systems I tried. Folders sharing feature is cool. Another interesting solution – integration into Outlook is also can be valuable for business users.

Minus

The Minus service is probably less known among others. I specially liked they level of how easy you can start using it as well as share files.

CAD Online Collaboration Services

CAD companies are thinking how to introduce their online services too. In the beginning of this year, SolidWorks introduced n!Fuze for SolidWorks. Last month, Autodesk introduced their new Autodesk Documents cloud services too. The obvious advantage of these tools is included connection to CAD content and additional viewing capabilities.

What is my conclusion? Drop Box for Team as well as other tools are cool and affordable. However, will it compete with specialized services such as Autodesk Cloud, n!Fuze for SolidWorks and some others? I don’t think so, for the moment. Their feature list is too narrow for CAD files. However, here is the thing. I definitely can recommend CAD vendors to learn how all these services are designing their user experience. It will allow to improve usability of specialized CAD-oriented services. What CAD vendors can learn – usability, usability, usability. In my view, very important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Collaboration. Not virtual. Whiteboard…

August 31, 2011

Collaboration is an important thing. I think you agree with me. However, speaking about collaboration how many of you are looking how to collaborate and discuss things using whiteboards? I think there are many things that just need whiteboard for an appropriate planning and thinking processes. I recently was reading Robert Scoble Gets Demo of eBeam solution from Luidia. Spend 15 minutes of your time and take a look.

What is my take? Frankly, I’m not a big fan of whiteboard. The main reason – I’m paperless. When I’m using whiteboard, I need to take care and capture it with my iPhone or digital camera. However, working with many people remotely, such a device can provide a significant improvement to engineering teams located in multiple places. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Unexpected Office Collaboration Option

August 30, 2011

I think the world around us is about to change. A couple of weeks ago I posted PLM and Future Competition. The existing traditional structures of vendors, domains and applications are changing faster than we can expect, in my view. Collaboration was one of the fields enterprise software and vendors in CAD/PLM domain were dealing for a long time. Frankly, I have never been excited much about the "PLM collaboration" offering. In my view, it is very complicated. Consumer oriented brands and lately companies like Google and some other did a better job in this domain.

I learned yesterday about an interesting acquisition – Cisco buys collaboration startup Versly. Versly was a small startup focused on collaboration inside Microsoft Office environment. Take a look on the following video showing one of the earlier Versly demos:

Navigate your browser to the following link on Cicso website to read more about this acquisition. I found the following passage interesting:

Collaboration is one of Cisco’s five company priorities and represents what Cisco believes to be a total addressable market of 45 billion. The acquisition will provide more opportunity for Cisco partners to provide enhanced collaboration solutions to customers. Versly’s software will be integrated into a variety of Cisco’s collaboration offerings including Cisco Quad, Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx. For example, users will be able to receive automatic notifications within Cisco Quad when the content of a document has changed, escalate from simply reviewing a document to an instant messaging session through Cisco Jabber, or initiate a web conferencing session from a presentation through Cisco WebEx.

What is my take? I think PDM vendors need to take a note. Why? Hardware vendors are stepping into software water. The example of Cisco is a good one. I cannot imagine how most of the manufacturing organizations can live without MS Office documents. People in product development, manufacturing and supply chain are spending lots of time working around Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. The Office integration becomes a vital part of any PDM/PLM related environment. One of the challenges in front of PLM vendors is how to expand downstream. It is a vital part of PLM growth plan. However, existing vendors can find Cisco eating PLM collaboration lunch… Just my opinion, of course. YMMV.

Best, Oleg

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Engineers and Video Collaboration?

July 26, 2011

Think about enterprise software and collaboration. I think, collaboration is boring. It is complicated, requires lots of system configuration and implementation skills. Try to talk to your colleagues engineers about a potential new system for collaboration. How many will be listening? Probably something is wrong. What can be a new reality for "collaboration"?

MenloParkPatch announces, “Facebook Launches Video Chat.” You can see Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made his livestreamed product announcement. Facebook will include video chat powered by Skype’s technology. I found the following Zuckerberg passage interesting:

“I actually think the driving narrative for the next five years or so is not going to be about wiring up the world, because a lot of the interesting stuff has already been done,” he said. “It’s about what kind of cool stuff you’re going to be able to build… now that you have this wiring in place.”

As you can see Facebook is not alone in this video chat race. Google just came with a new feature in Google+ called Hangout.

What is my conclusion? I think, an average manufacturing company already implemented way too many enterprise systems. Maybe we need to stop trying to re-invent "collaboration" by introducing new names and set of complicated user interfaces? Let just think about adding some cool features. Think, video chat is one of them. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Collaboration: From Old Concepts to a New Reality

July 19, 2011

I wanted to touch the topic of “collaboration” today. The term collaboration is very broad. Hit Google to search for “collaboration” and you will see Google counter jumps to ~240’000’000 results in 0.2 sec. The word “collaboration” has lots of meaning. Navigate your browser to the Wikipedia link about collaboration and you will see all of them – from arts to business and technology, including kibbutz, military, business and some historical meaning coming from a second world war. I found the following one as the most appropriate in the context of engineering and manufacturing software:

Due to the complexity of today’s business environment, collaboration in technology encompasses a broad range of tools that enable groups of people to work together including social networking, instant messaging, team spaces, web sharing, audio conferencing, video, and telephony. Broadly defined, any technology that facilitates linking of two or more humans to work together can be considered a collaborative tool. Wikipedia, Blogs, even Twitter are collaborative tools. Many large companies are developing enterprise collaboration strategies and standardizing on a collaboration platform to allow their employees, customers and partners to intelligently connect and interact.

Now, let’s move to PDM, PLM and other “sorts” of collaboration. Engineering software (including PDM/PLM) is practicing active usage of word “collaboration” for the last decade. For some reasons, marketing fellows decided that the term is selling well. So, they oversold…

These days, “collaboration” means almost nothing. Collaborative PDM (cPDM), Collaborative PLM (cPLM), Collaborative… Engineers actually hesitate to say “I’m collaborating”. One of the most strong opinions, I’ve heard about collaboration came to me in the comments to my previous blog post about collaboration:

I work as an engineer. So after seeing this social trend proposed for CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM I cannot bear anymore and have only one thing to say! This is all bullshit and we engineers do not need it! Let me explain a of course…

First of all in a typical environment the only person to whom I want to collaborate is another engineer and I will come to him ,or email, with direct problem or issue to seek advice or help. In most cases he is even sitting in the next room to me. I do not want to collaborate with all the people in the company, I do not want to collaborate with people who do not understand what is the difference between bolt and nut, and I will not :) ! And later constantly get email updates that new answer is posted, this is worse than SPAM! I do not want to collaborate with PR, Marketing, Manufacturing etc in an endless thread of useless suggestions about the fastener type, color, button, shape etc. Because all these things should be defined already in specification, if they are not and you still have to ask all that from the people mentioned above, this means that this project will lead to a disaster and will be a huge money drain. Management should act immediately if these things are happening in a company

New Social Way

Last two years, we are facing a massive influence of social networking and other internet-related technologies (i.e. Web 2.0) on what before we call collaboration. One of the most “passionate” about that - Vuuch is proposing to stop usage of word “collaboration” in the context of collaboration software. Vuuch proposes a very interesting term called “Enterprise Social System” to explain the technology to revolutionize the way engineers can collaborate (oops.. work together) based on the more efficient contextual information sharing. Navigate to 1 hour length webinar which will take you step-by-step into a new “social way” of working together. When I think, Vuuch is really innovating by trying to find a new way to solve the old problem, I found the following passage from Vuuch blog a bit provoking.

But we never use the C(ollaboration) word to describe Vuuch. In our minds, there’s a bright line between the capabilities and usage patterns in Vuuch and a legacy system like SharePoint. And we understand that until the conventional wisdom catches with Vuuch, many people need to use transitional terminology to feel comfortable.

It explains, actually, why Vuuch is using word collaboration internally in the software:

The Reality – People Just Want To Drink a Beer

I can see these days are really going to change a lot in the way people collaborate or just simply working together. The changes are coming from a complete new set of technologies and tools we have at our disposal to communicate and share information. Here is my short list – mobile, communication and data sharing. It becomes much easy these days to communicate. Think about a mobile device you keep in your hands. Your ability to contact people changed completely for the last 3-4 years. It is true not only from the standpoint of capability, but also from the cost standpoint. Communication, including broadband web access, video conferencing and tele-presence allows us to talk with people remotely almost without any problems. Finally, data sharing technologies were improved dramatically. In my post – PLM Online Data Sharing: From Spreadsheets to Databases, I discussed various products and technologies that can help you to share data. Here is a part of one comment I’ve got related to data sharing capabilities of Google Docs: The bigger advantage is total freedom of device…your laptop, an associate’s laptop, your phone or iPad… Just look at what college students are doing with cloud technology…a good barometer of what they will expect once in the workforce.

What is my conclusion? I think, collaboration is a word that will continue to live with us forever. However, technologies, product development and marketing will move towards something simpler and well understood. I think, future engineers will share screen, part, bill of materials to work together without thinking about how collaborative or social a particular software is performing. This is my view on the reality of collaborative software. What is your take?

Best, Oleg

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Autodesk and SharePoint: collaboration with no compromises?

July 6, 2011

Collaboration and SharePoint are two of my favorite topics. I’m following them for the last couple of years. In one of my very early posts on PLM Think Tank I wrote about SharePoint PLM Paradox? Microsoft SharePoint 2007 business model made it very successful. Technology was decent and I’ve seen many customers and business partners are making success with SharePoint deployment and development. I saw a definite potential for SharePoint to enrich PLM experience from both technological and user experience side. However, I don’t see the roadmap towards SharePoint success in CAD/PLM business as something simple and straightforward. Different vendors in CAD, PDM and PLM spaces are targeting differently SharePoint. Earlier this year I put some of my thoughts about PLM and SharePoint in the following post – PLM and SharePoint: Business Together? The SharePoint roadmap was bumpy for some of the vendors, and I shared my view on PTC’s, SharePoint and ProductPoint Retirement. Navigate to the following link to learn more.

SharePoint 2010 – even more collaboration?

Microsoft announced SharePoint 2010 almost two years ago. The new version of SharePoint put additional focus on business aspects of SharePoint integration within enterprises. Content type management, BCS, Lists, Web Parts, Workflow – this is only a short list of enhancements and topics Microsoft was focusing on in SharePoint 2010. I put some of my thoughts about the Sharepoint 2010 path in PLM back in September 2009. Navigate to the following two blogs to read more: SharePoint 2010 Communities and PLM Social Demands and SharePoint 2010 for Collaborative Product Development Applications.

Autodesk, SharePoint and PLM Option

In my view, Autodesk stayed neutral with regards to SharePoint long time. It doesn’t mean Autodesk products didn’t provide some support for SharePoint. Nevertheless, I haven’t seen SharePoint as a strategic option for Autodesk.Autodesk Vault, provided set of technologies and tools for product data management (PDM) and collaboration.

Earlier last week, Autodesk announced about Vault and SharePoint collaboration. Navigate to the following link to read the announcement – Autodesk Vault Works with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to Provide Access to Design Information Across the Enterprise. In my view, this is a notable change in Autodesk’s strategy. Here is the passage from the announcement:

The solution takes advantage of features and functionality provided in SharePoint 2010 and Autodesk Vault 2012, giving SharePoint 2010 users direct access to engineering and design data within Vault, including search and navigation, and the ability to view and print design data.… SharePoint 2010 users now have direct access to building information modeling (BIM) and digital prototyping data within Vault and can incorporate it into existing enterprise data, tools and processes.

In addition, the press release release is talking about technologies such as social computing, federated search, Microsoft Web Services and Microsoft SQL Server.

What does it mean? Brian Schanen put two videos on his blog presenting how Vault is integrated with SharePoint 2010. Here is one of them presenting Manufacturing scenario:

Let me make some observations. Autodesk is highlighting some changes in Autodesk Vault such as “a project oriented UI” and process orientation. The presented scenario shows collaboration in the context of engineering change order. This is one of the most popular scenarios presented by mainstream PLM vendors in the context of design and engineering collaboration. Huh… Autodesk is moving to PLM? This is not a new topic. Almost a year ago, I posted -Autodesk, Data Management and “Why PLM?” topic. There is no consensus about Autodesk PLM move in the industry community. In my view, PLM move will not be an easy jump for Autodesk.Recently, I can see some changes in Autodesk PLM orientation. During the recent meeting with Autodesk Management, Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO made some interesting statements with regards to Autodesk and PLM strategy. You can listen to Carl’s talk and see presentation by navigating to the following link (you will have to register and leave Autodesk you email address to access this link).

SharePoint Technology: Strengths and Weakness

Technological aspects of SharePoint integration with Autodesk Vault is another interesting question. Since I wasn’t able to find any published information about that, I can only guess and rely on Autodesk video, Microsoft SharePoint technology and architecture slides. SharePoint is a technology and platform. SharePoint platform contains lots of benefits for every company running Microsoft stack and, in addition, has lots of bells and whistles. Many enterprises are running their collaborative efforts and content management projects using SharePoint. At the same time, in order to be successful, it requires consultancy, consultancy and again, consultancy. It is important to estimate the cost of free SharePoint. Deployment is another aspect of how SharePoint option will play for Autodesk customers. Read the following blog – PLM and SharePoint Scalability to get a glimpse of the idea. SharePoint can be a powerful tool, but it requires an appropriate planning.

What is my conclusion? My hunch, statement is probably outdated. PLM ideas have some roots in the ground. PLM mindshare vendors are selling PLM solution, and Autodesk is asking themselves a question what alternative to put in front of PLM collaboration and Top Down single point of truth. Bridging SharePoint and Autodesk Vault is a step towards trying to find that solution. Autodesk MLP hardly can be considered as an option. There is probably a better option. Autodesk needs to figure out how to develop that. Interesting time… Just my opinion, of course. YMMV.

Best, Oleg

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PLM Excels and Microsoft Cloud Office 365

June 28, 2011

Do you know what is the most widely adopted PLM system in the world? You probably can guess based on the title of this blog post – Microsoft Excel. I’ve been writing about Microsoft Excel and PLM many times.

PLM Excel Spreadsheets: From Odes to Woes
Why Do I Like My PLM Excel Spreadsheet?
Do We Need Chief Excel Officer To Manage BOM?

Microsoft just released Office 365 in the cloud:

Earlier today, I was reading details about Microsoft new cloud offering. Navigate to the following link to read – Microsoft puts Office in the ‘cloud,’ confronts Google. What is the story? For many years, Microsoft was leading in Office space selling Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook to individuals and enterprises. The market share of Microsoft Office products is huge. However, for the last couple of years, Google succeeded to introduce a strong cloud competition to Microsoft Office products – Google Apps. To compete with them, Microsoft is placing Office product in the cloud for a very competitive price. This is a very interesting quote from Reuter blog post:

Google, which has had the most success in the small and medium-sized business range, says there are now 40 million users of online Google Apps suite. Microsoft does not publish equivalent numbers, but research firm comScore has estimated 750 million people worldwide use Office in some form.

PLM and Office in the Cloud

So Office is hearing in the cloud. What does it mean for manufacturing companies and PLM vendors? One of the most problematic side effects of working with Office and specifically with Excel was the ability to share data and collaborate between different people in an organization. Separate Excel files, even if you put them in the shared drives, are very bad for this. Multiple PLM systems were focused on how people can work collaboratively sharing information about drawings and bill of materials. With the introduction of Office 360 and growing competition of Google, PLM companies can find their collaborative solution with cloud collaboration supported by Excel running on cloud. Microsoft is emphasizing how Office 365 will be used by small and medium customers first. As you can see on the picture below – it is just $6 /month.

What is my conclusion? I don’t think, PLM vendors will be in a real jeopardy because of Microsoft Office moves to the cloud and competing with Google Apps. Large manufacturing companies are complicated, and PLM vendors sit deep inside with the implementation of complex PLM product suites. However, what happens with hundreds of these that are running Microsoft Excel as their PLM system? Time to make some thinking and calculations. Important…

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

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Autodesk, SolidWorks and Collaboration Renaissance

June 28, 2011

Brian Roepke of Autodesk brought my attention to Autodesk Nitrous Lab Project earlier this week. The context of this comment was about some Autodesk viewing technologies that don’t require any flash or plug-in. So, I decided to put my hands on Autodesk Project Nitrous this morning. When I’m still trying to figure out what is that viewer technology Autodesk is using there, Nitrous made me think about what is going with collaboration and cloud.

SolidWorks n!Fuze – PLM Collaboration Renaissance

Few months ago, I’ve posted about SolidWorks n!Fuze – a new cloud service coming from SolidWorks to help share and collaborate between engineers. I found interesting the way SolidWorks were planning to introduce this service. On the fundamental level, it is not introducing any particular new functions – you can load SolidWorks files and share them. So, what is new? The cloud storage based on Enovia V6 and completely new user experience.

SolidWorks n!Fuze was in Beta testing few months after SolidWorks World 2011. I had a chance to play with that. The user experience was good. The service is not available now. According to the information provided during SolidWorks World, it will be released later this year.

Autodesk Nitrous – a dropbox for CAD files?

Project Nitrous provides a very simple set of functions: upload files, upload new revisions, manage folders, preview, tag and comments. Take a look on few screenshots I made during my tests. The subscription to the service was easy and straightforward. You are getting 1GB of data when you register with Autodesk ID.

The home screen is simple. You can get to the list of file or folders, comment, sort, filter and tag.

Viewer is integrated into a web browser.

I found versioning function a bit strange. It wasn’t clear if it keeps separate copies of the file. When uploading a new version of file, I was alerted that name of the file was changed. The overall it gave me a history of versions in a separate screen.

Autodesk Nitrous is available as Labs product. You can register and use it now. Navigate to the following link to subscribe.

What is my conclusion? CAD and PLM vendors are thinking about the cloud. Looking on services like Dropboxand some others, SolidWorks, Autodesk and others are trying to create similar services adopted to the CAD content. In my view, these are just experiments by CAD companies about how to leverage cloud and relevant infrastructure. Will real customers end up by adopting these services? I’m not sure. Security is still the issue for most of them. At the same time, newcomers like GrabCAD are working on a bit different flavor of cloud libraries containing publicly shared CAD models. GrabCAD is helping engineers to sell their work and services online. A different aspect of collaboration maybe?

Just my thoughts..
Best, Oleg

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RSS, PLM Collaboration and Activity Streams

June 9, 2011

Do you know what is RSS? I’m pretty sure a large amount of casual internet users are not aware about what is RSS and what is RSS readers (Aggregators). I even believe there are people that using Google Reader without actually knowing they are using RSS. On the other side, RSS is a technology that in my view can be very efficiently used to improve collaboration.

Enterprise RSS Hub

Time ago, I wrote about Enterprise RSS as an interesting opportunity. Navigate your browser to the following link -How to improve collaboration and information delivery with RSS. You can also take a look on the associatedForrester research paper from 2007 written by G. Oliver Young – Enterprise RSS Tackles Information Worker Overload.

Vuuch – Better Collaboration via RSS?

I was intrigued to read Alex Neihaus comments on Vuuch 4.5 release mentioned Vuuch support RSS as one of the most exciting features. Here is the passage:

A new Home page with activity streams and RSS feed capability. Vuuch 4.5 features a redesigned home page that now offers an activity stream. The Vuuch 4.5 activity stream is a time-ordered list of changes to the projects and deliverables the user is involved with. Unlike consumer social networking sites and their business-targeted clones, Vuuch 4.5 activity streams are specific to the projects and people that the user is currently working with. By “narrowing the focus” to just the things the user cares about, Vuuch 4.5 eliminates the need for users to manually filter the social system’s content to get value from it.

Here is Vuuch video presenting how it works. Take a look an make your opinion. The idea of providing information about changes is not a new. However, to make it RSS-compliant is interesting, since it leverage proven technologies and improve system openness.

What is my take? I think RSS is a good and reliable technology. Web relies on this technology for years. As 2 years ago, I still hold the opinion that this technology is undervalued by vendors in enterprise space. RSS can help to make systems more open and interoperable. The fact Vuuch decided to use it a good sign. On the other side, RSS is probably too “geeky” to become a feature for end users. Many people I talked to are still preferring email simplicity and reliability instead of RSS Reader.

Just my opinion.
Best, Oleg

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PLM, Microblogging and Communication

April 23, 2011

Communication is a vital part of everything we do. How do we communicate these days? Email is one of the most popular ways to communicate. Recently talking to many people I found that many young people these days have no email account. So, what is the next way to communicate? Social networks and microblogging software (like twitter) is a new way. However, manufacturing companies are still run by email systems. What will happen to these systems in a near future? What transformation required to make it more efficient?

I read CMS Wire article – IBM Says Merge Your Email into Activity Stream. IBM is under going transformation of their Lotus system to make it more efficient. Ed Brill, Director Messaging and Collaboration IBM Lotus Software is talking about future transformations into Activity Streams. No surprise these days, IBM is using "App" concept to present a new way to transform communication. Here is my favorite passage:

…But IBM doesn’t think we should live in our collaboration tools. The activity stream will be the app Brill told us — on the desktop, on the mobile, in the browser. Imagine getting up in the morning, opening Activity Stream app on the mobile and seeing what’s important to do that day/right now…

IBM roadmap is talking about big mix of tools coming out of Lotus and even Cognos to create meaningful information streams. IBM research team is working on this. IBM is not mentioned dates.

Now I want to turn from "research" space to the software that available today and can be used inside of the organization. Rawn Shah Forbes blog article – Corporate Microblogging Helps Employees Migrate Work Conversation Online. There are two examples of software mentioned in the article – Yammer and Socialcast. Both are microblogging platform for enterprise. When started few years ago, Yammer presented as Twitter for enterprise. I found quite many people in my eco-system mentioned that their companies are implementing Yammer and successfully use it for communication.

Enterprise microblogging systems have a different and significant role in conducting business than what you may find in public systems like Facebook or Twitter. They provide insight to what is actually going on within the company, and allow employees to breakthrough the often thick glass walls of organizational silos. They are going to be a vital component of social business. By starting with simple conversations they help employees transition to conversations in an online mode, beyond phone calls and face to face meetings, lifting the whole organization to new levels of social business maturity.

Information Streams

The biggest criticism I’ve heard about social communication is related to the definition of "noise". Do you really want "everybody following everybody" noise coming to you via new social tools? No, I don’t think so. However, the problem of email nowadays is exactly the same. Email is a single overloaded stream of information. Opposite to Facebook and Twitter, we consider everything in our email box need to be read. This is a source of so called "email overload". The new way to handle communication is to use "information streams". I have them in my twitter account as "lists". Similar organization can be applied to other communication tools. Yammer has three possible way to group communication between people – networks, groups and community.

PLM and Microblogging

The term "collaboration" is one of probably most confusing. PDM and PLM vendors presented multiple concepts and products that supposed to help people to collaborate. None of them was able to shift the way people communicate and email was king of the road all the time. Microblogging tools may create a new way to communicate also inside organizations. Is it possible to use the same tools like Yammer to communicate between people in product development organization? I think positive about that option. One of the key elements to succeed in this transformation is to connect information to this communication. This is a tricky part of this transformation game.

What is my conclusion? The internet and mobile tools created new ways to communicate. Tools like Yammer and Sociacast can transform communication paradigms. Manufacturing organizations and product development can use these tools to make communication easier. PLM tools will integrate towards mainstream communication platforms to leverage the power of microblogging and social networking.

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

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