Office Competition Gets PLMish?

May 23, 2013

Office and other productivity tools are un-separateable parts of product development environment. Some of them such Microsoft Excel literally can stop product development and manufacturing in many companies. I’ve been blogging about Excel and Office many times. Couple of weeks ago, I came back to this topic with my – PLM Excels and Future Downfall of Manufacturing post. If you remember my presentation about PLM development trends, Office is part of so-called DIY (Do-It-Yourself) PLM.

For the long period of time, Microsoft Office was (and probably still is) unbeatable by other Office providers. Word and Excel are ultimately de-facto standards. You cannot live without these two applications installed on your computer regardless on your role in manufacturing company.

At the same time, the competition in Office space is getting more aggressive. One of the Office competitors (Google App) was keeping the status of "good enough" alternative, which make impossible to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets as a real alternative to Excel and Word. There are some news in this space. Navigate to the following article – Google Is Prepping A Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office. Google is planning to play a catch up game with Office. Well, this is a not a very big news.

The following picture made me re-thing some of my thoughts about Google Apps, PLM and competition in this domain. Take a look below.

The keyword is "mobile". Google Apps are getting significantly better on mobile devices for the last year. The ability to edit and work collaboratively on mobile devices can be a groundbreaking feature and game changer in the ability of Google Apps to compete with Office. What does it mean for PLM? Collaboration is very important in product development and manufacturing. Even small companies can be distributed among 3 locations in different continents these days. Google collaborative functionality can provide a very easy and simple way for people to collaborate.

What is my conclusion? Mobile is disruptive. We like this word "disruptive"… It smells good to all technological geeks and bloggers. Will ‘mobile office’ change PLM excel competition ground rules? I think about capability of co-editing bill of materials in online spreadsheet using your iPad or Android device located in different places – manufacturing shopfloor in China and restaurant in Palo-Alto, CA at the same time. Do you like the idea? Well, I’m kidding. Dont’ work in restaurant on you BOMs :) . Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image source – Google.

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GrabCAD Workbench: First Experiments

May 3, 2013

(Updated with some modification. May 3, 2013 @9:42a)

In my yesterday post, I’ve been talking about PDM software, obvious value proposition behind PDM implementation, the fact a substantial amount of manufacturing companies are afraid of implementation PDM software as well as about how cloud software startup are trying to crack the idea of PDM and may be implement it differently. I wanted to have some hands on done and experiment with new apps on the cloud. Hardi Meybaum of GrabCAD was kind to grant me an access to Beta preview of GrabCAD Workbench.

After some confusion around multiple GrabCAD accounts (actually I have two accounts now), I succeeded to login and get to the project page (below). You can see project browser and area dedicated for file viewing. Nothing special, you can see it in many engineering software – CAD, viewers, etc.

I experimented with GrabCAD viewer. The “explode” feature is nice. So far, I get an access to SolidWorks assembly Hardi shared with me and was able to play with navigation between parts and sub assemblies.

Next thing – you can collaborate by sharing files with other users (which I did by sharing with my another gmail account – as a result a new GrabCAD account was created). The new user (account) provided me access to SolidWorks assembly with all parts and not only to a specific part I shared. This is probably a hint to GrabCAD engineers to think about security model, which will be absolutely must if you want to get your software closer to PDM functions of secured collaboration.

Another collaborative feature – pins and comments. I can put a pin in the viewer, put comments, screenshot and share it with other people. Nice collaborative feature. Also, you can put comments alongside with viewer file.

The last step in my experiments was to make a change or to upload pseudo “new version” of the assembly. The original file shared by Hardi was labeled as V1. So, I downloaded the file and change its name to something different in hope to have V2. I succeeded to upload the file, but didn’t get a preview (that was my fault of file renaming – see update below). Instead of preview I’ve got a nice feature allowing me to request a preview feature for this type of file. That was true for dwg and dwf files I tried to upload.

I’ve been working on viewer problem I faced. That was actually my fault by renaming file with wrong extension. I’ve been re-do it again and… voila, GrabCAD viewer captured it with nice message about queueing file for 3D viewing preparation, which ended with absolutely correct preview after 5-8 seconds processing.

Another interesting observation was “switch to old look” button, which gave me an access to traditional GrabCAD profile page with file access, properties and comments. Project was marked as private project – good sign of thinking about security. On the other side, it means GrabCAD workbench is a natural extension to GrabCAD website with the ability to access other projects as well.

What is my conclusion? GrabCAD Workbench is focusing on providing engineers with the tool to share CAD models and collaborate around CAD design. Because of cloud/hosted nature, it is easy to start. I found user experience nice and soft. I’ve been disappointed by absences of basic security implementation between parts and assemblies. I’m looking forward to talk to GrabCAD fellows and learn more. This is just my first impression… More to come.

Best, Oleg

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Will SharePoint and Yammer struggle from PLM problem?

September 17, 2012

As you probably know, enterprise social vendor Yammer is now part of Microsoft SharePoint division. As always, after integration, the question you want to ask is how both products will interplay together. Immediate after acquisition, I posted – Will Microsoft-Yammer kill social plm? – not yet… One of the conclusions I’ve made was about the ability of a collaborative system to provide a right context for communication. Few days ago, my attention was caught by Microsoft SharePoint Blog – Productivity Improvement with Yammer and SharePoint 2010. Chris Buckley brings a very simple use case of communication between SharePoint and Yammer.

Here’s the use case: You add a document to SharePoint, or maybe you’ve found a useful presentation or site within your company portal and want to share it with your team through a Yammer group on your company network. You can push a document with the comment from SharePoint directly to Yammer – adding tags and mentions, and bringing it to the attention of your followers or the relevant group.

I believe, the scenario is very applicable in the context of collaboration between engineers and other people in manufacturing company. This scenario made me think about the efficiency of communication. Sharing of document in Yammer can connect it contextually to communication that happens between people. On the other side, I’d expect to be able to share a part of the document or to highlight a specific contextual fragment. Otherwise, the communication reminds a traditional email.

What is my conclusion? The ability to share a context between multiple systems is critical for communication. So far, I can see very little attention in SharePoint and Yammer integration. Maybe SharePoint 2013 will bring some additional capabilities. Many PLM systems are trying to improve the way people collaborate today. However, the majority of them are struggling with the ability to share information in the contextual way. Similar to SharePoint / Yammer. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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What PLM must learn from the success of Email?

September 7, 2012

One of the biggest issues PLM vendors want to solve today is "PLM adoption". PDM/PLM moved from a toolbox to out-of-the-box (OOTB), from OOTB to industry best practices. Cloud is another promise. Another buzzword PLM industry is using today is "social". In my view, the best way to learn about the user adoption is to learn from the somebody else’s success. Speaking about the adoption in the organization, email is always on the top in my list. You probably had a chance to read my blog post last year – DIY PLM and Zero email policy. In my view "social" is having hard time to compete with emails. In many situations, company processes are literally run by emails. Enterprise software vendors are trying to kill emails with variety of tools, but email doesn’t want to die. I was reading an interesting article earlier this week – Email Will Never Die – The Man Who Invented It Reveals Why. I recommend you to have a look. I found some unknown facts about email history. I liked the following passage:

“I think it was mostly used as a replacement for telephone calls,” Tomlinson says. “You got a more immediate response. With time zone differences, you didn’t have to have someone there to receive the call.”

By co-incidence, my attention caught by another article on the same topic – Is email dead? Or is it moving to social networks? Samuel Driessen is capturing the discussion about why email will stay long time with us. The most important arguments are ease of access, email documentation trail, cross time zone access and openness.

Both articles made me think about what PLM vendors and implementers need to learn from the email success to improve PLM adoption across the organization. Here are my top 3 actions:

1. Access. The top priority for PLM tools is to become easy accessible for people in organization. 90% of people in organization are consuming information that created by less than 10% of people. To make PLM tools available and easy for the majority of people is absolutely important.

2. Openness. Email is incredibly open. I don’t need to work with your email server to send you an email. The infrastructure is open and technology is invisible. To make PLM to work seamlessly is another huge action. Today, "integration" is a significant showstopper to make PLM tools to be used by many people in organization.

3. Communication trail. This is an interesting topic that can provide huge value in organization. In many situations, the communication between people gets lost in emails and phone calls. PLM tools need to provide a way to capture this communication in a very painless way to make this communication history retrievable and available for people. It will help a lot for decision making and many other situations.

What is my conclusion? PLM vendors can learn a lot of email success. Email is still one of the major communication instruments in the organization. To learn from email practice, to apply it in PLM tools and make PLM tools to be integrated with email is the right way to go to become successful in PLM deployment. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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New Collaboration and Data Hostage Game

August 17, 2012

Think about the most overused term in PDM/PLM software for the last decade (or even more). Collaboration. It was developed and sold in different flavors and packages. Remember CPDM – Collaborative PDM? Later it became Collaborative PLM. Moreover, don’t forget e-Collaboration and many others. If you want to refresh your memory, navigate to the following link with CIMdata article – Definition of cPDM.

Time is moving fast. Last decade of internet, consumer devices, mobile and web 2.0 changed the face of how we share information and collaborate online. At the end of the day, I need to collaborate with my family, kids, friends and I do it on-line in a very efficient way. So efficient, that the question "how I can do the same in my company?" becomes almost obvious.

Earlier today, the following paper commentary from CIMdata came to me via twitter (thanks Chad Jackson for his tweet). The article The Changing Face of Collaboration (Commentary) is speaking about how Collaboration is changing as a result of influence made by the technology, mobile and consumer based software. Here is the first important passage I captured

In many ways we are witnessing the convergence of a number of technology-driven themes that have the potential of significantly changing collaborative work processes within and outside of a company’s four walls. The first technology-driven theme can be categorized as the consumerization of information technology (IT). The second is the explosion in the availability, capability, and usability of mobile information delivery devices. And the third is the entrance of social media-savvy individuals, who’ve grown up using Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet, into the corporate workforce. This convergence is well underway and today’s companies need to prepare and implement the appropriate processes and technologies that support the new way of collaborating.

Later, author is making the conclusion about the absolute need to develop new collaborative processes, otherwise we will become dinosaurs of the previous PLM solutions. Here is another passage:

The need to define and enable new collaborative processes and enabling technologies are not optional, they are mandatory–not only for Generation Y but also for the rest of us who need to compete in this highly collaborative and connected world. Without providing the correct level of support, today’s PLM solutions will be tomorrow’s legacy systems.

Well, we have a bunch of new technologies, new Gen-Y workforce. What next? What needs to be done in order to deliver a new kind of collaborative processes? It made me think about openness again. Let think about the web and social networking. Availability of the information on the web was one of the most important prerequisites allowed companies to develop websites and apps that deliver value (starting from Google search and ending with last social nets like Pinterest).

There is a problem that does exist in all PDM / PLM systems. These systems are taking data hostages. Let me explain what I mean. Whatever they manage – files, processes, communication stays in the system. In general, almost all of them claim openness, but in practice it doesn’t mean much. You can make a test by trying to share data out of these systems using some generic infrastructure without exporting the date (for example, in Excel file). How I can share Bill of material from my PDM system in SharePoint without exporting it? How I can share preview of my CAD model on the supplier website of my company without "dance with a tambourine" and additional coding?

What is my conclusion? In order to facilitate collaboration, PDM/PLM software products need to stop taking data hostages. It means sharing of information out of these systems needs to become a first priority for product data management software. The open infrastructure of data sharing will create a new eco-system that will help people to collaborate. After this stage, we can expect many other companies and products to come with applications helping people to collaborate using openly available information. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

image credit sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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From Design Collaboration to CAD Social Tools

August 15, 2012

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.

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

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What Outlook.com can make for PLM collaboration?

August 13, 2012

If you follow news these days, you probably paid attention to Outlook.com – newcomers from Microsoft and "Gmail twin brother". You can learn more about what Microsoft offers, navigate to the following link. Microsoft is quite aggressive by calling Outlook.com – next email for next billion mailboxes. You can check the following lifehacker article comparing Gmail with Outlook.com to see how new Microsoft’s web mail stands against Gmail. The next picture can give you a glimpse of what new email can do.

What caught my attention is that Microsoft is attacking the email problem from the same angle many of the companies today are attacking PDM, PLM and engineering collaboration – how to make it simple. Navigate to the following articleby Microsoft introducing new email. Here is the passage I liked:

Webmail was first introduced with HoTMaiL in 1996. Back then, it was novel to have a personal email address you could keep for life – one that was totally independent from your business or internet service provider. Eight years later, Google introduced Gmail, which included 1 GB of storage and inbox search. And while Gmail and other webmail services like Hotmail have added some features since then, not much has fundamentally changed in webmail over the last 8 years – though yesterday’s frustrations about the small size of inboxes are now things of the past. At the same time, email is becoming less and less useful as inboxes become cluttered with newsletters and social updates, and people increasingly keep up their personal connections in social networks instead of their email address books.

Will Microsoft re-invent gmail second time? Microsoft claims they invented webmail with hotmail back in 1996. It is true, hotmail came earlier than Gmail. Few days ago, I’ve got an unconfirmed note that there are more hotmails accounts in the world than gmail accounts. I cannot confirm that. Will Microsoft inject their outlook.com solution into existing Office and Outlook? This is a question that can make some difference to engineers and other people dealing with collaboration and PLM. At the end, lots of companies (even if they have the variety of enterprise app) are run by email.

Microsoft claims they invented webmail with hotmail back in 1996. It is true, hotmail came earlier than Gmail. Few days ago, I’ve got an unconfirmed note that there are more hotmails accounts in the world than gmail accounts. I cannot confirm that. Will Microsoft inject their outlook.com solution into existing Office and Outlook? This is a question that can make some difference to engineers and other people dealing with collaboration and PLM. At the end, lots of companies (even if they have the variety of enterprise app) are run by email.

What is my conclusion? Usage matters. Today majority of people in manufacturing organizations I know are using MS Office and Outlook. This is a first user interface most of the people open in the morning. If Microsoft can inject Outlook.com into this place, it will automatically pretend to serve as a powerful collaborative tool. Then the question will be how to embed PLM apps into this space. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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CAD Project Cloud Collaboration… What?

July 19, 2012

The life around us is changing fast. Consumerization. BYOD. Cloud. Social. We are in the middle of the biggest technological change that happens in front of our eyes. What does it mean for engineers? Apparently engineering needs are no much different from what it was 10 years ago. The fundamental need to work together (avoid word "collaboration"), exchange design (files, data?) and see the history of changes actually remain the same for a very long period of time. However, the life and environment around us are a bit different these days. The consumer behavior influenced our mind and push us to explore new opportunities.

I was reading SolidSmack’s blog post – GrabCAD Revamps to Push Out CAD Project Possibilities. This is not the first time I’m referencing GrabCAD on my blog. The dynamic and growing startup initially focused on creating of "Facebook for Engineers" recently shifted gears toward CAD collaboration. It looks to me the idea of collaboration and usage of 3DViewer, CAD history (versions) is a way to re-think the reality of cloud work for engineers? I found the following conclusion made by Josh Mings interesting:

Where could it go from here? Competition is heatin’ up in the web-based 3D collaboration scene, and it’s likely not going to slow down. GrabCAD has huge user base, the web presence and the combination of CAD library, 3D file viewing and private sharing, which makes it a very good resource for a project space–limited to an extent, but simple to use. There is no version tracking yet, but viewing at the ‘Files’ tab shows how it’s being pushed toward more organization and file options. But is version tracking really needed?

Josh is speaking about competition. So, I decided to take a look – who is around to do a similar type of job. I found few products and technologies.

Autodesk 360. New cloud tool coming from Autodesk. The idea behind Autodesk 360 is to provide unified cloud experience to people using CAD and other design tools. You can upload files to Autodesk 360, preview them and use basic collaboration.

BuzzSaw. Another product from Autodesk. BuzzSaw is focusing on collaboration around projects (mostly use in AEC and construction domains). The idea of project space and ability to upload files and make them available is a dominant one in BuzzSaw.

AutoCAD WS. This is another paradigm shift product coming from Autodesk (the WS stays for Web Services). In a nutshell, AutoCAD WS is Google Docs just working with CAD (DWG) files. It is on the cloud, and you can upload and download files. Mobile clients convert AutoCAD WS in a popular tool you can use when "on go".

n!Fuze. This is a relatively new product from Dassault Systems. Focus of n!Fuze is how to make SolidWorks CAD (but not only) files available and shareable between people.

3DVia. Online community created by Dassault System. People can upload CAD files and share them. Dassault sees 3DVia as a part of their future broad consumer strategy 3DSwYm (See what you mean). 3DVia is probably more useful when you work with CATIA. However, I’m not aware about limitations in working with other CAD systems as well.

In addition to these specific tools, I’d be mentioning few "generic purpose" technologies and products that can provide cloud, community and file sharing capabilities – DropBox, Google Drive, Sky Drive, Office 365.

What is my conclusion? I think, software for engineering industry is ready for the biggest "rethink impossible" moment these days. Challenge fundamentals. Achieve impossible by making things simple again. Will it be done by large companies or small startups? It really doesn’t matter. Winners will be companies that can adapt faster to new technological and business realities. Just my thoughts.

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Co-browsing and future of CAD design collaboration?

July 11, 2012

Experience. We love this word nowadays. I can hear many discussions about "experience" these days. The last five years of computing and web shown that "experience" is actually very important. The examples are going from iPod and mobile devices to complex web sites and social networks. CAD / PLM companies are also thinking about "experience". Earlier this year, Siemens PLM announced about the re-inventing of PLM experience with HD PLM. Few weeks ago, Dassault System announced about the new vision called3DEXPERIENCE platform.

However, I want to steer your attention in a bit different topic – co-browsing user experience. If you haven’t heard about that, navigate to the following link to learn more.

Co-browsing, in the context of web browsing, is the joint navigation through the Internet by two or more people accessing the same web pages at the same time. Early co-browsing was achieved by local execution of software that had to be installed on the computer of each participant. More advanced tools didn’t have to be installed, but still required local execution of software or at least web-browser plug-ins, extensions, or applets. Most tools were limited to a single user that was able to navigate, while the others could only watch.

I read an interesting announcement earlier today: Salesforce.com is acquiring GoInstant - startup developed a platform for shared co-browsing. No plug-ins, installations, working within the browser. On the following video, you can see how two people are working with co-browsing inside of Google+ Hangout.

GoInstant blog brings the following article – 7 ways to use co-browsing technology. One of them is collaboration. Here is a very interesting passage:

Collaboration. When collaborating on a website or web application, co-browsing makes it a more seamless experience because there’s no passing of control back and forth between participants. Everyone is able to engage in real-time and interact through the co-browse session.

Now just think about CAD instead of Google+ Hangout. The idea of co-browsing made me think about a potentially interesting value it can bring in improving collaboration. Imaging similar video to what you see above, but with CAD application showing multiple cursors from of different users working on the same design. The cloud future can be bright as well – the combination of CAD with co-browsing can give an additional level of simplification.

What is my conclusion? I think the idea of collaborative browsing can "hold the water". How many times you worked with shared screen on your computer? I did it many times. To have multiple engineers working on the same design can be an interesting option in your future CAD application in the browser. What is your take? Speak your mind…

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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PDM, Collaboration and Google Apps

June 6, 2012

Data management and collaboration are not new topics. I think, the majority of industry experts agree that proper data management can improve collaboration and people performance. However, not much happened beyond this statement for the last decade. The deployment of data-management systems remains complicated, and the majority of end users see data management as a devil that needs to be addressed by IT and/or upper management.

Google Apps and Document management collaboration

I’ve been reading Forbes article Google Apps by numbers by Gil Zimmermann of CloudLock sharing some interesting number of anonymous survey CloudLock made of their mid-market and enterprise clients. The following passage caught my attention:

The Exponential Growth of the Cloud. The projected average growth in Docs/Sites year-over-year is 10X for mid-market companies and 4X for enterprises.These growth rates indicate that the average mid-market company will have 35,000 more Docs/Sites in 2013 than they had in 2012; enterprises will have close to 750,000. Much has been made about companies’ reluctance to embrace the cloud. However, this data shows that once businesses make the decision to go to the cloud they jump in with both feet.

It made me think about the potential of cloud based document management to simplify the adoption of data-management tools by making it seamless and less complicated.

PDM and Cloud

I can see some initial movement in the process of cloud system introduction to the market. Autodesk 360, AutoCAD WS,SolidWorks n!Fuze are examples of how CAD/PLM vendors are trying to mimic Google Apps. I see these examples as something very positive. I’m looking forward to the Siemens PLM announcement of a new version of SolidEdge Insight XT and the possibility of Insight XT to work with SharePoint on the cloud.

What is my conclusion? I think, we are coming to the point when next disruption can happen in PDM space. For the last 10 years, most of CAD/PLM vendors were focused on how to improve the bundle of CAD/PDM. However, cloud can give some new tools and capability to improve PDM. My hunch that releasing users from data-management pain and complexity by leveraging cloud apps can be interesting opportunity. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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