A few years back the Wiki and Sharepoint were at a frenzy or mania level with users everywhere. I wonder what has happened? From then to now many PLMers have written about how these technologies could be used in Product Development. While these assumptions are interesting and certainly not wrong, they suffer a fatalflaw. While they address the fact Product Development teams want flexibility and ad-hoc tools the wiki and sharepoint have no understanding/definition of a Product or what Product Development is all about. This leaves the users to define and manage a structure. For instance in a wiki a page about a Part would is the same as a page about a Requirement or a page about an Issue. In this case the team must manage a framework for such pages. Following on with this, let’s assume in this wiki you now want a BOM. Certainly you could just create another page and call this page BOM, but we have Part pages already… Yes you could just type each Part page URL onto the BOM page, but this seems like work, don’t you think? Would there be a real WOW factor if the BOM page grouped the Part pages together and allowed you to add Structure/Organization?
Without an understand of what the team is working to deliver technologies like the wiki or sharepoint, are just empty infrastructure.
