On-Demand Communication For Design Teams

Social, connected, conceptual, and instinctive are the four pillars of the 3DEXPERIENCE—the next step for the design community!

We should all know what these words mean on their own, but how does that definition change in the context of the design environment?

Let’s explore the definitions of the first two pillars: social and connected.

social adjective
: relating to or involving activities in which people spend time talking to each other or doing enjoyable things with each other
: liking to be with and talk to people : happy to be with people
: of or relating to people or society in general

connected adjective
: joined or linked together
: having useful social, professional, or commercial relationships

In addition to the formal dictionary definitions of these words, there are interpretive definitions that come to us spontaneously and are shaped by our everyday feed of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and a host of other tools that have changed the way we interact.

Before social networks existed, I would never have known what my high school classmate had for lunch yesterday—certainly an example of oversharing—but has anyone ever been accused of over-communicating at work?

In my experience, most companies could use a better communication feed.

It seems like every time I attend a quarterly business planning meeting, the number one complaint is communication. I find it impossible to get out of one of these meetings without hearing the “there just isn’t enough communication” statement being made.

I also find that no matter what steps or promises get made about increasing communication, the next meeting features the same complaint. Surely, 20 years ago the same issue was being discussed. Today we have the ability to be up to date on the lives of friends and families through numerous social networks.

Why not at work?

Our idea of how much information is needed to feel connected has increased dramatically. With distributed design teams, it seems that webcams, conference calls, and email strings a mile long have become the standard form of company-related communication.

There has to be a better way!

3DEXPERIENCE addresses these complex problems in a simple way: it is a single source for on-demand, proactive communication through an online tool.

To begin your journey, simply log in to your 3DEXPERIENCE dashboard, which shows all your projects (or communities) and is completely customizable. It can show you everything from the latest news to project communication.

This is the 3DEXPERIENCE.

3DEXPERIENCE allows you to launch apps, contribute to ongoing conversations, stay up to date, and post in a secure area of the cloud called a tenant, which is like a building in city.

Your company owns whatever is in the building, and users are granted access to floors and rooms based on a key card that allows access to selected areas. Your company pays rent to the city to have access to the building, and your building is not directly connected to any other building. As a key card holder you can be granted access to other buildings, and the information stored in each building cannot be moved. This model is very secure, and allows an owner of a building to carry their licenses to the next building.

I like the tagline “Have license, will travel.”

Access to applications like SYWM takes you to a more in-depth community-level view of recent activity. SYWM is entirely social and is the heart of the 3DEXPERIENCE. Other members of the community can post questions about design problems (more to come on this in the SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual post), respond to questions, create wiki pages, and post ideas.

You will also be able to instant message other members of your network.

All of these features have been available in the past; however, they were distributed across multiple platforms, and required that you remember where you saw each one. This one app will change the way we communicate inside and outside organizations. Add the other 3DEXPERIENCE apps and your capabilities become that much greater.

Tags: 3DExperience, CAD, concept, conceptual, connected, design, GoEngineer, intuitive, mechanical, social, SOLIDWORKS, SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual, technology, whats next

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2014 at 4:16 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.