Archive for category Vuuch Release
Import Excel Project File
Posted by Chris Williams in News, Vuuch Feature, Vuuch Release on July 15, 2010
Almost every project team is tracking project issues and tasks in excel. Well now you can quickly turn those excel files into Vuuch pages and activities. In case you are not fully up to speed on da Vuuch terminology here are two important things to understand:
- Vuuch Pages:A Vuuch Page represents something you and/or the team cares about. It could be nothing more than a simple list (Things I got to do) or a group of issues you need to address (Bugs I am working on) or a file that you are trying to complete (For example a CAD file or maybe a budget in Excel) or some component of your product (The Base_Unit). Vuuch Pages collect Vuuch activities as well additional information about the thing the page represents. Since Vuuch Pages represent the things the team is delivering and therefore in your excel file these are either grouped together using a colomn or Excel tabs.
- Vuuch Activities:A Vuuch Activity is a threaded discussion that can be classified as an Issue, Task or Discussion. Vuuch Activities represent the line items in your project spreadsheet and therefore they have a status (Red, Yellow, Green or On Hold) and participants, an owner and a due date.
Now that you have a basic understanding lets look at how you can convert your project excel file to Vuuch pages and Vuuch activities. Take a look at the video below and you will see how simple this is.
All you do is reform the spreadsheet based on the Vuuch terminology, save it as a Excel 2003 file and then import it. Done. You now have Vuuch pages and activities created.
Vuuch Releases for Primetime
Posted by Chris Williams in News, Vuuch Feature, Vuuch Release on June 14, 2010
A new version of Vuuch available. Many of you have been using it but for those that have not you can download the new add-ins from www.vuuch.com/download and put the power of social to work for you and your team. Want to checkout an overview of this release then checkout the release notes http://vuuch.com/release_notes.
The biggest baddest newest feature in this version is the ability to pay. Yes that’s right Vuuch has paying customers.
This version marks an important point in the development of Vuuch as this version is being released for sale. Yes that’s right Vuuch is ready for primetime. No worries, trial accounts are still active and are still available. Who needs a paid account? Only the people on the team that create a Vuuch page will need a paid accounts. People who participate in activities and work on pages that have been created by others DO NOT need a paid account.
Subscriptions are simple, one price for one year and Vuuch as much as you like. Subscriptions are $250 and use the link below and your favorite credit card to purchase a subscription.
Facebook Your Autodesk Inventor Files
Posted by Chris Williams in Inventor, News, Social Media, Vuuch Release on May 18, 2010
Ken Wong wrote a first review of Vuuch for Inventor. I really enjoyed his explanation of Vuuch as well the video that he put together. He pointed out the solution that is “Facebook for Files” doesn’t have a Facebook fan page, so I guess I know what is on my agenda for today.
I look forward to following up with Ken as both the Vuuch platform and the Inventor add-in evolve. For anyone interested you can find a public Vuuch documentation page here. You might being asking yourself “Public Page”? Well although most items in Vuuch are private to your team it is possible to make information public. For instance maybe you want to ask an Engineering question or maybe you have a question about how to do something in your CAD system? Or maybe you want to create a public page for responses to a problem. The Vuuch documentation page provides access to not only the file but also any public questions people have about the file.
There are many use cases for Vuuch. In the demo Ken put together you can see how Vuuch replaces that Excel file your team is using to track part design issues. Another use case we have seen is when a drawing is being checked for release and you want to track all the items that need to be fixed. Vuuch the drawing file and create a Vuuch activity for each issue that is found. As each issue is correct by the team it can be either archived or forward it on to another team member to validate the change.
Vuuch for Autodesk Inventor
Posted by Chris Williams in News, Vuuch Feature, Vuuch Release on May 3, 2010
Well Vuuch for Autodesk Inventor is right around the corner. We have a first version of the Vuuch for Inventor plug-in running and we are looking for people to give it a try and provide some feedback. If you are an Inventor user and want to try go to www.vuuch.com/download/inventor.
The initial functionality is limited:
- Currently you can only Vuuch the file. You cannot connect a Vuuch Activity to a selection in a file. For example in SolidWorks or PowerPoint a Vuuch activity can be related to a feature of the model or a slide in the presentation. This will be the next step in Inventor.
- Currently the Vuuch UI is a separate dialog window that pops up in front of the Inventor window. In our next release we will work the Vuuch panel into the Inventor UI.
- Currently you must work in the new ribbon mode. You cannot run in the “Classic” mode.
To see Vuuch running in Inventor check out this movie http://www.vuuch.com/files_for_download/vuuch_for_inventor.swf.
New Vuuch
Posted by Chris Williams in News, Vuuch Feature, Vuuch Release on April 20, 2010
New Vuuch plug-ins for MS Office and SolidWorks www.vuuch.com/download. You no longer need to remove the old version of the plug-ins. The new plug-ins check for newer versions and automatically install if needed as well you will find a number of small enhancements like RMC archive.
Over the last few days we’ve released a number of new features on the WEB portal. Now any Activity that is unread by you is shown in Bold (WEB Only). This feature is not yet implemented in the plug-ins but it will be soon (About a Week). You will also notice that using the WEB portal you can create a Vuuch page that is not related to any file. This is just the beginning of a new development project which will deliver features that allow you to define the Product you are designing (a collection of Vuuch pages pulled together in a Product Structure or BOM).
And for those Autodesk users stay tuned as next week we will release an Autodesk Inventor plug-in. We are also looking for someone that knows Autodesk Vault API that is interested in working with us on a Vuuch plug-in for Vault.
Da Vuuch
Follow A Friend Makes No Sense
Posted by Chris Williams in PLM, Social Media, Vuuch Release on February 12, 2010
I have been thinking a lot about Facebook and other social tools lately. Mostly due to the fact that we used Facebook as a framework or analogy for the new release of Vuuch. As you all know we decided to make Vuuch public even before we had a working product. The idea behind this is we truly wanted to elicit feedback from users. Working with different types of teams and our prior release we discovered a number of user experience issues that we wanted to address in the new release. You can boil all of this down to two items, user habit and value of a consolidated view of what is going on. User habit is a tough nut and Outlook seems to be like crack cocaine or cigarettes. You know you shouldn’t but you just cannot help it… With respect to a consolidated view our beta users never really realized that when they created a discussion in their SolidWorks file Vuuch created a WEB page that represented this SolidWorks file. Armed with this data and filled to the brim with the caffeine needed to sit and watch how users worked, the product management team set off to twizzel a new plan.
We centered in on the idea that we needed to enforce the notion of the WEB page Vuuch creates when you Vuuch enable something. I must admit that we came to this conclusion working with a buddy that has the best job of all. He is a marketing VP for the largest domestic beer company in the US. Unlike us engineering types he spends his day trying to figure out how to make a bottle of beer and a bikini look good next to each other. Which really isn’t that hard… It struck us that Facebook was the right analogy. When you Facebook someone you are focused in on a specific person and anyone who might also care can see what is going on. In Vuuch rather than representing people we represent what people are working on.
Our next issue was Outlook and that ugly thing we call habit. Well instead of tilting windmills we jumped on the bandwagon and created an Outlook add-in. So if you are stuck in Outlook and cannot kick the habit you are safe with Vuuch. I must say the Buzz has been more than Google. The users that have tried the Outlook add-in do something very simple. They smile and say cool.
If you want to see these two things in action checkout the 60 second video http://www.vuuch.com/media/quick_outlook_demo.wmv.
Let me close by tying back to the title of this post. Social media or social network applications that are used in our personal lives revolve around the idea that you follow people. Many companies have taken this idea and built systems that target the enterprise. Well this is a great example of why linear thinking is easy and wrong. Following a friend makes perfect sense but following a colleague is going to do nothing but generate tons of noise. Think about the guy in the next cubical that work very closely with. Well even though you work together the majority of what they do does not affect you. If they are working on 100 items do you really care about each of these? No I think not, even if you are involved with each of them, which is most likely not the case. In an enterprise setting the value of following a person is much lower than the value of following a deliverable. Al la Facebook for files. Follow the files you care about and OH ya guess what when you have nothing going with that file Vuuch no longer pings your inbox.
IDC PLM Predictions 2010
Posted by Chris Williams in News, Vuuch Feature, Vuuch Release on January 22, 2010
Joe Barkai of IDC presented “Insights Predictions 2010: Manufacturing Product Lifecycle Management” today. Although we did not rate a slide Vuuch did rate a mention. One angle discussed was the impact social media will have on PLM and product development as a whole and within this Vuuch was mentioned as having an interesting angle/approach. What seems compelling from where I sit is Vuuch was mentioned in line with PTC Product Point and Team Center. The WEB cast replay can be found here http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=182280&s=1&k=15896A60283FDED8D9FFB56F87D17D17 for those that did not have the chance to catch it live.
We will release a new version shortly that implements some exciting new functionality. Think Facebook for parts! Say you are working on a design of a part that involves other people and you want a quick way to track all the issues, tasks, discussions and notes in a simple way that everyone can access and stay aware of what is going on (Lets also say you are frustrated doing this with excel files that seem to always be out of date and piles and piles of email). Well just right click on the file and say create WEB page and you are DONE. If you would like to check out what this looks like take a look at this page http://www.vuuch.me/collaboration/fileRepNW4/discussions/251. The Vuuch enabled part now has a page that represents everything that is going on with the part and all the people involved (If you have compliance or design history requirements then you will love this). Anything added to this page shows up within the part file (In the example above the part is a SolidWorks file and therefore everything seen on this page is synced withSolidWorks). One thing to note – you can do this WITHOUT checking the file in and out of some vault. So leave the file where it is right for you and connect and communicate in a flexible and socialable manner.
Vuuch V1 Pre-Release
Posted by Chris Williams in News, Vuuch Release on October 1, 2009
Vuuch V1 has reached pre-release. Go to www.vuuch.com to get new Vuuch add-ins and release notes. We have signed up a few more teams but are willing to take more. Contact us about using Vuuch in production.
New Vuuch Profiles
Posted by Chris Williams in Vuuch Feature, Vuuch Release on June 29, 2009
Today, well OK over the weekend, we updated the server with some new features around profiles. Now you can add some cool things like a picture… Also you can now view other people’s profile. Look in your contact list and you can see the profile of anyone on your list that is a Vuuch user. Your contact list contain Vuuch users and non Vuuch users (“email contacts”). If you want to see someones profile that is not a contact then use the add contact button and search for someone and you can see the profile of anyone in the list. We are looking for ideas of how you would like to discover other Vuuch users. For instance if you create public discussions, would you like to see all other people who create public discussions?
New Release of Vuuch (WEB Portal and Add-ins)
Posted by Chris Williams in Vuuch Feature, Vuuch Release on June 23, 2009
We just released a new version of the Vuuch. To check these out please uninstall your old add-in adn install the new add-in. You can find the add-ins at www.vuuch.com/download. There are some great new enhancements, all things you have been asking for:
- User profile – Each user can now maintain a simple profile. While the current implementation is simple it is the start of some interesting developments.
- Contacts – The management of contacts has been greatly improved. Now you can maintain contacts that are NOT Vuuch users.
- Public discussions – Instead of closing a conversation to a small group of your contacts you can now open the discussion to everyone on the WEB. Public discussions are made available to anyone that wants to extract them using the Vuuch open API. For instance you can see public discussions being posted at www.vuuch.net. Any comment made at www.vuuch.net is feedback to Vuuch. So the next time your have an engineering question or a question of how to do something in your application just create a Vuuch public discussions.
- WordPress addin – Anyone running a WordPress based site can extract Vuuch public discussions using this addin. The code is available for open use and modification. So if you would like to modify this code to work with say PHPBB then you are free to do.
- HTML widget – If you would like to host Vuuch public discussions on your WEB site then use our HTML widget. You can see an example of this here on the blog or generate your own widget.
- Multiple image – Now add as many images as you want to a discussion. While creating a discussion or replying to a discussion you can snap an image of the screen. If you find an image you don’t like or don’t need just right click the image and delete it.
- Image names – As you create iamges you can use the default names or type any name you want. Now your image name makes sense.
- Reply from email – A little known feature that has worked for a while is reply by email. Those people you invite to discussions can just hit reply to the email the get from Vuuch and the reply is connected to the discussion. There are a few limitations with this. At this time you cannot add people to the reply nor can you add an attachment to the reply.
Keep the feedback coming. Thanks to all those beta users for giving us things to work on.
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