SolidWorks Gets Tagged! PLM 2.0 or People’s PLM, You Decide…

Tagging could be PLM by the people, for the people…  If you haven’t read Oleg then commit an hour and give his blog a read.  In a recent post he writes about the value of tagging.  It is a great idea because as we all know it makes things easier to find.  The only problem I see is it will require a user to do something that is not really natural, or can be seen as an extra effort (you have been able to tag in SolidWorks for a long time and it seems poeple don’t really use it).  A blogger is motivated to tag because it helps get them readers.  A CAD user is not looking to be read, or are they?  Any way, the bottom up approach to providing value is certainly a great thing and very WEB 2.0 or PLM 2.0.  If the data being tagged could be the smallest bits of information within a design project, then tagging could even have greater value.  What if my email was tagged?  What if the whiteboard discussion was tagged?  What if my todo list was tagged?  Wouldn’t these small bit of information be valuable when sorting out a design problem at some point in the future?  I think so!  I would even argue these little bits of information are the real IP of the product. 

The power of the WEB is also evident in Oleg’s post.  While writing the post, his inbox pinged him, and like all of us couldn’t ignore the email popup.  Fortunatly, this time the email was relavent to what he was doing, as it was about SolidWorks and tagging.  I wonder what he did with this mail?  Because he can get back to this information through his blog or many others, I imagine he deleted the message.  But what if he was a designer and the mail was about a design issue?  What would he do?  Most designers store their design related emails in mailbox folders, that they can search later.  But what if I was not copied on the email and the message is useful to me or affects me?  I will never know about it.  Well, ultimatly I will find out, because I will end up sitting in a team meeting saying, “boy I wish I knew that… now I need to redo last weeks work…”. 

Enter the Vuuch Empowered Discussion Server!  You no longer need to create these folders.  The discussion server will do it for you and a few steps further… by automaticly filtering messages for you.  When working in a CAD file if you connect to the server, the server will present all discussions that have anything to do with that file.