Social Networking meets PLM

I am a Twitter user….. are you? I am writing ‘tweets’ (as InsidePLM name also) as I want to understand how this technology can be used and what potential business value it may bring to an engineering process. Tweets you could consider the most simple form of collaboration, you let another person know what you are doing, you are in fact networking. Twitter could be considered a component of collaboration technology.
Today’s business environment of working together is complex and without a technology to help, you would really struggle. Collaboration technology encompasses a broad range of tools that enable groups of people to collaborate including; social networking, instant messaging, team spaces, application sharing, audio conferencing, video, and telephony. Many large but also SMB companies are developing ‘enterprise’ collaboration strategies and standardize on a collaboration framework to allow their employees, customers and partners to intelligently and virtually connect and interact.

Much of this ‘stuff’ is developed under the umbrella of Web 2.0. It concerns the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design, with the aim to enhance creativity, communication and secure information sharing. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs.

In a series of posts I’ll be writing about various functions and capabilities and how they may be used in a PLM context.

PLM and Micro Blogging

As I stated in the intro. I use Twitter. I got curious a while ago how this technology can be used in Engineering. Consider Twitter an internet based text messaging service. Yammer is the corporate intranet variant. Tweets are the actual blog posts (like this article). Twitter is in fact a so called micro blog. Twitter can be read by all, whereas Yammer only by those that share the same company email domain name. Coincidental, posts on Yammer are still called tweets.

Social Networks the Backbone of Integrated Product Teams

‘Facebook’ and the professional network LinkedIn are examples of an interactive way to keep in touch with people you know. In a business context these people may be colleagues or persons you may have worked with in the past or even ‘supplier’ connections.
I suppose we all know Facebook (FB), for those who do not, just google it. In this short post I will NOT be talking about the social side of FB rather the business side/potential.