Social Computing Meets Product Development

By DE Editors

With the widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and the evolution and acceleration of global product development initiatives, PTC says the market is ready for a measurable shift in the way products will be developed. The cornerstone of this shift is the marriage of social computing to product development, or what PTC is calling social product development.

“Collaboration has long been a critical component of product development, and today’s operating conditions are shining a spotlight on the ability of companies to share information and knowledge with team members in a secure, IT-friendly environment,” said Rob Gremley, executive vice president of PTC.

Joe Barkai, practice director for Product Lifecycle Strategies at Manufacturing Insights, an IDC company, notes “product companies will look to increase the adoption of Web 2.0 tools to capture and reuse organizational knowledge, and, when appropriate, to go outside the traditional boundaries of the enterprise to seek advice and other collaborative opportunities. As organizations continue to embrace social networks, they realize these are not merely collaboration platforms for open conversations and exchange of information, but strategically important to an organization’s ability to use social computing technologies for product development.”

A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of PTC surveyed more than 7,000 users of PTC and other products used for product development. Among respondents to this study, 89 percent use some form of social technologies at least once per month and 70 percent use these technologies for work purposes, suggesting that this population is well positioned to adopt social product development practices.

“With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft connects Web 2.0 and social networking technologies to address collaboration in a business environment,” said Kathleen Winder, director of SharePoint Collaboration Partnerships, SharePoint Server Group, Microsoft. “PTC is bringing additional value to product development through its Windchill ProductPoint solution by extending the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server platform to work with complex CAD and structured product data. PTC has combined the business logic layer of Windchill ProductPoint with the social computing capabilities of the SharePoint application framework, to introduce the benefits of social computing in social product development.”

The PTC technology stack used to support social product development consists of three technology layers as part of one platform:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (SharePoint) for document collaboration, and social computing.
• PTC Windchill ProductPoint for sharing, and reusing structured content such as CAD models.
• A layer of authoring applications that can include PTC Pro/ENGINEER for creating digital product representations; PTC ProductView for visualization, markup, and digital mockup of lightweight product viewables; PTC Mathcad for documenting proprietary engineering calculations; and Microsoft Office for authoring documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other content.
 

Manufacturers that adopt social product development using PTC technology will benefit from having an integral solution stack that is designed and tested to work together to complement existing product development implementations of PTC technologies. These same companies should also experience a lower total cost of ownership, according to the company, because the PTC social product development platform leverages services and capabilities that are part of the Microsoft SharePoint Server application platform.

“Social product development is the next step in the evolution of how people work together,” said Gremley. “The idea that social product development was ever considered to be a new and revolutionary model will seem inconceivable to the next generation of engineers who have grown up with social networking as a normal vehicle for information sharing. Organizations that are able to harness the power of social computing in their product development strategy will quickly outpace their competitors with greater operational efficiency and ultimately better products.”

For more information, visit PTC.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.