The whole team here at Vuuch wants to express our gratitude to our customers, who have designed many of the new capabilities in Vuuch 4.0 [...]]]> A new release of Vuuch, Vuuch 4.0, is now available. Because Vuuch is SaaS, current customers can take advantage of the new features that are detailed in the attached press release immediately.

The whole team here at Vuuch wants to express our gratitude to our customers, who have designed many of the new capabilities in Vuuch 4.0 and who have allowed us to work with them to implement these exciting new features.

Vuuch 3.5 features the ability to import product structures directly from SolidWorks, new domain administration capabilities, custom page types and more.

Details are in the press release attached to this post.

We invite you to join us for our weekly Vuuch overview, presented every Tuesday at [...]]]> We are very pleased to announce Vuuch 3.5 today.

Vuuch 3.5 features the ability to import product structures directly from SolidWorks, new domain administration capabilities, custom page types and more.

Details are in the press release attached to this post.

We invite you to join us for our weekly Vuuch overview, presented every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT. Register at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

If you’ve attended one of our weekly webinars (you can sign up here to join us any Tuesday), you know that we bristle at the mention of Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative extension to PLM. We believe SharePoint is perfect if you want to add complexity to [...]]]>

If you’ve attended one of our weekly webinars (you can sign up here to join us any Tuesday), you know that we bristle at the mention of Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative extension to PLM. We believe SharePoint is perfect if you want to add complexity to PLM. It’s a good thing if you want your team to spend more time on configuration than on working together. Select SharePoint if you believe people and teams should conform to the software rather than the other way around.

Still, because of Microsoft’s presence in the marketplace, lots of PLM purists (who believe PLM could succeed “if only people will change the way they work”) talk about SharePoint a lot. Oleg Shilovitsky, one of our favorite PLM bloggers, has just published a post pointing out that despite PTC’s (and others’) embrace of SharePoint, the shine is wearing off.

How about we skip surveys and go right to the source to see if SharePoint and manufacturing are a match? Let’s start with the 106-page “SharePoint 2010 Walkthrough Guide,” which can be downloaded here. Believe it or not, the fictional company in this marketing collateral is a manufacturing company. That’s perfect. What better way to see if SharePoint can actually promote better PLM collaboration? Maybe SharePoint will have our team up and running fast, collaborating to improve products.

First, the document sets the stage:

…Contoso is a fictional manufacturing company that produces gears for other industries that rely on gears in their products. You will be playing the role of Erika Cheley, who is a project manager at Contoso. She has just assumed the role of Project Manager for one of the projects that focuses on improving the production process for the manufacturing of the Great White Gear product. Throughout this walkthrough she will be configuring the site that she will be using to work with her project team. We will start the initial walkthrough as Erika makes some design changes to her site.

“Makes some design changes to her site?” Why do I want to start there? Why do I need to design a site before I can do anything with it? But wait, that’s not really the first task.

First, Erika has to create “the team site that will be used to manage her project” (page 5). Whoa! Wait a minute…before I design the site…I have to create it? Sounds like I need an IT guy.

But even creating the site…and making design changes, whatever that means, doesn’t get the team going. After Erika creates the site, she has to customize “the project team site to include a project description” (page 5). Doesn’t the project team already know what product it’s working on? This reminds me of what my eighth-grade English teacher used to tell me about essays: to make them good, you needed to throw away the first three paragraphs because most writers spend that time warming up. The good stuff is buried in the middle.

Yet, in Microsoft’s own documentation describing SharePoint for manufacturing, the first activity — simply describing what everyone already knows — takes nearly five pages to explain.

This is valueless work. It’s an example of what’s wrong with SharePoint for manufacturing. Every second of time spent putting knowledge we already have into some system adds to the cost of the product and slows down time-to-market. This is classic IT for IT’s sake. And it’s the reason the team won’t use it. It requires so much effort to simply get started, only die-hard PLMers will ever use it. That means you can forget ever getting finance people, marketing people, vendors and partners to use it.

Still, Erika doesn’t give up. She decides on page 11 that “she would like the site to reflect the Contoso brand and provide a graphical representation of product data…” OK. We’re about 10% into the walkthrough based on page count and so far we have had to create the site, describe it and now, duplicate the CAD data stored in the PLM system. Sorry, I am just not feeling it.

The graphics setup goes on to about page 17 — including creating a Silverlight “web part,” the function of which in the scenario escapes me — and would probably escape the team as well. Have we gotten to any collaboration on the gear part yet? Not quite.

It seems that while Erika is “very pleased with the changes made to the site” she still wants more setup. So, starting at page 17, Erika decides to change the site theme. This, including a “media web part” (wouldn’t 3DVIA Composer be so much simpler?) goes on to page 25.

OK, now that we’ve spent about 25% of our time just getting ready to do something, are we there yet? Are we ready to friend people to something the team cares about? Can we use Outlook and SolidWorks and Inventor to discuss problems, assign tasks and track issues? (These are things you can do in Vuuch from the start.)

Well, not quite…

Now that Erika has spent some time designing her site, she is ready to move on to the creation of content for her team site. She has a few specific things she would like to configure, including a custom order tracking solution, some document library configurations, and some workflows.

We’ve spent nearly 30 pages in this document setting up libraries and workflows (why anyone wants a collaboration workflow is beyond comprehension. Collaboration is, by definition, non-modal and and non-linear).

And we are still nowhere near being able to use the site for anything approximating collaboration. The document goes on and on and on with more configuration…more setup…more customization. We never quite seem to get to the actual teamwork.

I’ll spare you the rest. But you can see for yourself. No matter how hard its marketing people try, SharePoint isn’t about collaboration or improving teamwork in manufacturing. SharePoint is simply about glomming more “platform” onto already overweight PLM systems. That suits PLM vendors…not customers.

The result? End users avoid it like the plague, manufacturing IT people can’t understand why users “just don’t get it” and the wheel just spins.

Each Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT, we present Vuuch live. We hope you can join us at your first opportunity. You can always register for the next live webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

Attached to this post are recordings of the webinar we presented on Tuesday, [...]]]>

Each Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT, we present Vuuch live. We hope you can join us at your first opportunity. You can always register for the next live webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

Attached to this post are recordings of the webinar we presented on Tuesday, September 21, 2010. The topic is Vuuch and people-centric PLM. The demonstration of Vuuch shows slightly different capabilities than we showed in last week’s webinar and so we decided to post this replay in case you want to see both demonstrations via a recording of the live webinar.

There are two attachments in this post. The content is identical; the files different only by the codec required to view them. The Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file is about 50MB; the XviD-encoded .avi is 175MB in size and has slightly better resolution.

designnews.com’s Beth Stackpole reports that “Vuuch 3.0 adds a social networking layer to traditional CAD, PLM and desktop tools like Microsoft Word and Excel…Using familiar social networking concepts like ‘friends’ and ‘status updates,’ project participants can dynamically organize and share product content across a diverse team without the [...]]]>

designnews.com’s Beth Stackpole reports that “Vuuch 3.0 adds a social networking layer to traditional CAD, PLM and desktop tools like Microsoft Word and Excel…Using familiar social networking concepts like ‘friends’ and ‘status updates,’ project participants can dynamically organize and share product content across a diverse team without the constraints of more structured PLM platforms…”

Read the entire article here.

Attached to this post is a recording of the first of our new, weekly Vuuch webinars. This webinar is an introduction to the Vuuch Enterprise Social System for Manufacturers. If you are using CAD and/or a PLM system and want to improve product development, Vuuch is for you. We [...]]]>

Attached to this post is a recording of the first of our new, weekly Vuuch webinars. This webinar is an introduction to the Vuuch Enterprise Social System for Manufacturers. If you are using CAD and/or a PLM system and want to improve product development, Vuuch is for you. We are posting this for the convenience of visitors from countries in which our regular time for the webinar is inconvenient.

We present this material live every week. We hope you will join us for one of these sessions, which are scheduled for every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT. You can register for an upcoming Vuuch webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar.

The two files attached are identical and vary only in size. The .avi is a DivX-encoded file and is about 340MB. The .wmv file is much smaller, about 80MB. However, it requires the GoToMeeting codec.

Could your product development team work together better? Are decisions being made that aren’t being communicated immediately to the entire team? Does your team have any nagging issues with the project (how’s that for a leading question? )

If so, you will want to join us to see how [...]]]>

Could your product development team work together better? Are decisions being made that aren’t being communicated immediately to the entire team? Does your team have any nagging issues with the project (how’s that for a leading question? )

If so, you will want to join us to see how Vuuch can solve these problems.

Please join us on Tuesday, September 14 at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT for an introduction to Vuuch. Register for our webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar. In less than an hour, you will learn how social technology can revolutionize teamwork in product development projects.

Oh, and this week’s webinar will be the world premier of Vuuch 3.0.

We hope you will be able to join us. Register here.

Lately, the buzz surrounding social technology and product development has reached a fever pitch. Three recent posts with different, but intersecting, points of view have me thinking that unless we break out of the same old ways of thinking, nobody — save the incumbents selling the [...]]]>

Lately, the buzz surrounding social technology and product development has reached a fever pitch. Three recent posts with different, but intersecting, points of view have me thinking that unless we break out of the same old ways of thinking, nobody — save the incumbents selling the same old stuff — will benefit from a major shift in the way product development teams can work together.

Our friend Oleg has blogged about what he says are the five questions you should ask your PLM vendor about “collaboration.” Deelip Menezes has written about what he calls the “diminishing significance” of PLM. And bloggers at PTC continue to try to misdirect attention from their real agenda (a mother-of-all-heavyweight-social-platforms-on-SharePoint called “SocialLink“) with chirpy rehashes of  a 2004 book called The Wisdom of Crowds. (Actually, a high-performance product development team would act more like the experts described in Malcom Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink than like the crowd of lemmings PTC envisions. But I digress.)

The common thread that runs through all three of these blog posts? Revolutionizing the way product development teams work simply has to be a technology platform that’s big — something really heavy — something based on PLM.

Oleg simply assumes that social technology — what he calls “collaboration” — is part of a PLM environment. So, Oleg wants to help by positing questions you might ask a vendor of something so heavy.

Deelip muses the PLM acronym might be disappearing…but doesn’t seem to catch the irony that changing the name (or smashing together resellers) doesn’t fundamentally change the technology in any way. Just check out the “unified theory of gravity” slide in Deelip’s post showing layers — and layers — and layers — of PLM-or-whatever-PTC-is-calling-it-now software. That vision sure ain’t no simplification when it comes to expanding PLM to users across the enterprise. And expansion is key to changing the product development process.

And PTC…well, you know what they think. They have to argue that social technology is just another function on their platform — or they risk losing upsell opportunities to current customers. Because marketing, sales, suppliers, partners, finance — just about anyone outside engineering — isn’t interested in PLM.

All of this is so 1995. Check out the Lotus Notes ad image at the top of this post. This ad was making the case for the Notes “platform” for, I think, release 4.6. This was around the time Microsoft — which hadn’t released Exchange yet — began eating our lunch with a simple message: “What you really want is email. This collaboration stuff is too big, too complex for mere mortals. And when you do need ‘collaboration’ — whatever that is — we’ll be there with something you can use via a wizard in Exchange.” (Actually, they waited to copy Lotus QuickPlace in SharePoint…but you get the idea.)

What did we do at Lotus? We were the incumbent, believe it or not. We had thought-leadership. People looked to us to come up the solution for collaboration. So, we came up with an ad showing someone with so many “capabilities” he’s got hands coming out of his head. To put it mildly, nobody wants to be this guy. Least of all the teams across the enterprise we envisioned collaborating with our platform.

Notes was great. I loved Notes (still do, actually). But we killed ourselves by making collaboration too big and complex. Microsoft emphasized what people could actually adopt — and in doing so, toppled Notes.

Any of this sound familiar? Isn’t it interesting how Siemens, PTC and DS look and sound like Lotus did? And (I really relish this comparison) doesn’t Vuuch sound a lot more like the that’s-what-I-really-want alternative Microsoft was pitching?

Vuuch has learned the lessons of being overweight and corrected for them in our enterprise social system. Vuuch is not a layer on a PLM platform. We know that can never work and is simply convenient for PLM vendors. Vuuch is not a “collaboration link” to something so massive you have to know what five questions to ask before you can even think about using it on a product development project.

Instead, Vuuch is a system with manufacturing “DNA” that connects people through deliverables so they don’t have to think about how to work together…they can just do it.

So, the question for product development teams is simple: are you going to party like it’s 1995 (sorry, Prince) when it comes to using social technology?

Randall Newton has republished a interview with Chris from last fall. Randall commented then that Vuuch “…does add value to the product development lifecycle, so it fits in PLM.” This time, Randall notes Vuuch is “feisty.” We are enormously flattered by both Randall’s original and updated comments. To achieve [...]]]>

Randall Newton has republished a interview with Chris from last fall. Randall commented then that Vuuch “…does add value to the product development lifecycle, so it fits in PLM.” This time, Randall notes Vuuch is “feisty.” We are enormously flattered by both Randall’s original and updated comments. To achieve the change in PLM and CAD that we believe the industry is ready for, Vuuch needs to be both unique and aggressive. PLM users seeking better product development workflow can count on us for both.

Now, about the map you see above. Chris is on vacation somewhere in Kenya…and I am in the office…thinking feisty thoughts and remembering the night I stayed at the Narok Travel Lodge (“A” on the map) before taking the road to the Maasai Mara reserve. Unlike many American tourists, my traveling companion and I weren’t flying from park to park. We had rented an SUV in Nairobi, loaded it up with spare tires (which we popped daily) and were driving by ourselves through the Kenyan countryside. We were crazy…flat out insane.

So, what does all this have to do with Vuuch? Simple: by refusing to take the conventional road in Kenya, we learned and saw and experienced things that many tourists never see or experience.  (One day, I’ll tell you the story of how we convinced armed villagers not to shoot us by distracting them with Led Zeppelin songs. No kidding. You should see me cry when I hear Communication Breakdown.)

When Randall is talking about Vuuch being feisty, it’s because he knows that Vuuch isn’t going to “fly over” the issues in making the product development process better or gloss over the fact that PLM hasn’t really changed all that much in the way development teams work together. Randall knows that he can count on Vuuch for the much more authentic overland journey, at the end of which is real change and improvement for PLM users.

In the consumer landscape there are entire age groups that ignore email.  This is not to say they do not message… they are just stuck on [...]]]> Ever since the consumer embrace of social networking applications there has been a land grab to take social into the enterprise.  But guess what the consumer model CAN NOT work in the enterprise!

In the consumer landscape there are entire age groups that ignore email.  This is not to say they do not message… they are just stuck on a different type of messaging, Facebook, BBM, IM and others.  The truth is we humans love messaging.  So what is it about messaging platforms and why do we use different solutions?  The teen generation is not social networking in order to deliver work, they connect to stay up with what is going on and where the next party is.  But at work we message to get something delivered.  There is a huge value difference between these groups when comparing the impact of not reading something. 

Do you read everything on your Facebook page?  Of course not.  Do you really need to read everything on your facebook page?  Of course not.  But at work we are drawn to read every email, the moment it arrives, because it might have something to do with what we are trying to get done… it might have something to do with our work and what we need to deliver.

So what about Facebook being used in a design team?  It will never work!  Jim wrote about this not to long ago http://tech-clarity.com/clarityonplm/?s=facebook.  IMHO he missed the most important issue.  Noise…  You do not read everything on your Facebook page because most of it just doesn’t matter.  Even though there is a high level of noise in consumer based social solutions every application provider that has targeted the enterprise with a social solution has used the same consumer model.  The consumer social model is simple, you follow someone, ie you friend someone.  Well can you imagine if you followed everyone you had some sort of working relationship with?  YOUR INBOX WOULD EXPLODE and you would GET NOTHING DONE! 

Enterprise social tools are going to endup road kill!  It is only a matter of time before they become the next WAVE (see death of WAVE). 

OK so why is a guy who is selling an Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing standing up and saying Enterprise Social Solutions are going to fail???  Simple.  The relationship model in Vuuch is different and the relationship model in other social tools targeting the enterprise are wrong, wrong and wrong!  Of course we have friends at work, people we have lunch with etc, but an Enterprise Social System must understand that our lunch relationships are not what we want when it comes to getting things done.  An Enterprise Social System of course is people centric but more important it is content centric.  An Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing also understands that our connections with content vary over time and that for any one piece of content a single person may have multiple connections.  For example I might be the owner of a design specification, as well as I might be involved in two discussions about it and even more I might be resolving a set of issues requiring changes to the specification. 

OK so why is a guy who is selling an Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing standing up and saying Enterprise Social Solutions are going to fail???  Simple.  Content matters!  In the enterprise people work to deliver very specific types of deliverables.  The fact that content matters is no secret, but in the enterprise people are not going to sit around and blog, record videos of meetings or podcast, they are focused on getting something done.  An Enterprise Social System for Manufacturing understands what the team is delivering, a product.  For example if a design engineer needs to complete the design of a part they are not going to blog about what they are doing or record videos of the problems they have.  That said they are going to record design issues that need to be resolved. 

OK so why not make the PLM tools social?  PLM tools cannot be social.  PLM targets structure, control and is only embraced by a small number of users.  Design issues are connected to everyone in the enterprise and cross multiple applications.  Imagine a simple design problem that connects together a purchase order, a part and people from purchasing, the vendor and engineering.  This simple problem touches the CAD and ERP systems and maybe PLM (in many cases it would not), but most certainly it connects to people who will never be a PLM user.