This weekend I spent a good amount of time out on the lake and my son and daughter and several others were attempting to learn how to wakeboard and surf behind the boat. I grew up on the water and have owned a couple of boats in my day so I am very comfortable behind the boat. Skiing and wakeboarding is second nature to me. I am not turning pro at any point but I can hold my own jumping wakes and doing the occasional trick. I was struck by how difficult it is to transfer that knowledge to others. Trying to explain to others the steps it takes to get up on a wakeboard or a surfboard is very difficult. I have noticed some similarities in trying to transfer knowledge to others about Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as well. As consultants we tend to immerse ourselves in whatever PLM technology we implement and support and sometimes this makes it difficult to  share with others how to use the technology effectively in their environments. This blog will discuss how to overcome these challenges and analyze the different ways knowledge can be transferred to end users and administrators attempting to leverage PLM in their companies. I will also discuss a couple of miscellaneous topics around PLM websites including our recent launch of our new review site PLMState. (http://www.plmstate.com).

I had mentioned in a previous blog how much planning I like to do when I go on vacation. Unfortunately, when you're out on the road there are a lot of variables that can wreck even the best laid plans. On our way from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Durango, Colorado I experienced a small insurrection from my crew. It wasn't quite a mutiny but there definitely was some insubordination. Apparently, we had eaten breakfast too late and none of them wanted to partake of lunch at my carefully selected lunch destination, "The Shed". They weren't very hungry and were eager to get on the road to our ultimate objective, Durango. So I found myself several hours later in Cuba, New Mexico with a car full of hungry people trying to figure out where to eat. Fortunately, I had recently downloaded the application "Yelp" to my Blackberry. It is a review tool that keys off of your GPS location and suggests restaurants in whatever area you find yourself. Even better it offers user reviews so you can evaluate how likely it is that you will contract food poisoning in certain obscure establishments. "Yelp" recommended El Bruno's which surprisingly had several reviews. One was so over the top positive I suspect it was from an employee but we went ahead and gave it a shot and we all survived it without major illness. This blog will analyze how we can leverage technology like "Yelp" in the PLM space to help make smarter decisions about the software we use and companies we work with to optimize product development.

Continuing on our world tour of PLM sites our next destination is the Dassault Systemes site which contains PLM information for Enovia. Much like the blog reviews for Oracle, PTC and Siemens we will discuss the pro's and cons for this site. One thing to note right off the bat is that Dassault's definition of Product Lifecycle Management differs somewhat from the other three vendors I have reviewed. This difference affects the content and the way it is organized on this site. From an organizational and execution perspective I think this is a very well done site. The navigation is clear and both PLM and social media and community information is featured prominently on the Dassault homepage. Where the site falls short is in the depth of information about PLM especially in comparison to some information available from other PLM vendors and their products. Dassault's PLM solutions are tied very closely to their CAD and automation tools. This fact is highlighted at the top of their page where they offer a hyperlink for PLM and explain how PLM alongside their simulation and CAD empower users to create, share and experience products in 3D. This blog will highlight the consistent structure that Dassault offers through their site which makes finding information very straightforward. Unfortunately I suspect that most, like me will wish for a bit more depth. I also wanted to commend Siemens on their response to my review of their site. Chris Kelly from Siemens brought up some good points about why their site is organized the way it is. They wanted to organize the demos in the context of the product they are associated with and wanted to offer navigation options to different types of users by offering the four different vectors on the front page. He also agreed that they will feature their blog more prominently and expose video content more readily on the product landing pages. I think these are great moves for the site and I am very impressed that Siemens closely monitors the user community.

For some reason that I can't explain I really like the show Top Chef. I am not sure why since the most complicated dish I can whip up is tunafish casserole. In the show they have team events that generally prove to be the undoing of one of the contestants. The problem is that all of the chefs are supposed to generate a meal for the judges but with all the egos and stong personalties it is difficult for them to distill a singular vision to create a compelling meal. The team leader that harnesses this energy usually wins and the one that doesn't goes home. We announced today that we are embarking on a product study around expanding our DesignState Integration platform to address mechatronics (see press release). This issue was brought to our attention by several clients and partners as an ongoing challenge for companies trying to integrate design information for electrical, mechanical, and software components for their products. Historically, our product development efforts were usually driven and funded by one or two of our clients. Our original DesignState architecture was developed in response to some specific requirements from John Deere and then further extended by requirements from Cisco, Paccar, Harris and Raytheon. The nice thing about this approach was that we had customers right out of the gate but the challenge was that the feature set was very specific and had limited appeal to a broader market. As we have geared up for this new product release and I now find myself calling the shots I wanted to cast a broader net as we move forward with this new product release. I have come across a couple of relevant opinions when it comes to market research. I recently attended a meeting where Rob Adams, founder of AV Labs and currently a faculty member of the Management Department at the University of Texas was speaking about market validation. His book, "If You Build it Will They Come?" explores the mechanics of market validation and how to figure out what the market really wants to buy versus what customers say they want. He emphasizes how important it is to get on the phone and to talk with clients and see how important the problem your solving is to them. He doesn't really address social media as a mechanism to interact with clients which I think is a potential oversight. Another opinion I encountered was courtesy of Erin Sheehan Daly from PTC. She had left a comment about one of my previous blog articles and in the comment she mentioned an interview with IDC's Mike Fauscette on the perils of crowdsourcing. So the question this blog will attempt to answer is will leveraging crowdsourcing and social media provide a useful conduit of information for product development companies or will the quality of the information be diluted or compromised by the methodology?

As we bring the "Virtualizing Agile PLM" series to a close I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss the why's around virtualizing as opposed to the "hows" that Rodney covered quite capably in the 4 part series. The movie Jurassic Park is a cautionary tale about technology. Many companies seem to share a fear of new technology. There is comfort in familar ways and the leading edge can often be the bleeding edge. As Jeff Goldblum so eloquently stated in the movie, "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should". In the case of virtualizing an enterprise software product like Agile PLM you can and definitely should consider it. We have been espousing the virtues of virtualization for some time but percentage wise significantly fewer small and mid-size companies have embraced the technology. A staggering percentage of Fortune 500 companies leverage some form of virtualization but medium and small businesses have lagged a bit to jump on the bandwagon. My personal observation is that small and medium size businesses don't have the same level of staffing in their IT organizations and that their IT challenges in areas that virtualization addresses aren't quite as urgent as larger companies. The value proposition for large companies is quite compelling but as you get into smaller companies it muddies a bit. I would argue that for general IT this may be true but for getting the most out of enterprise software products like Oracle's Agile PLM, Siemens's Teamcenter, PTC's Windchill PDMLink, Oracle EBS, and SAP virtualization offers clear advantages over traditional operating system (OS) and server bound approaches. This blog will highlight some of the advantages of utilizing a virtualized environment when running enterprise software solutions.

I have certainly seen a lot of posts in LinkedIn about whether cloud computing is a viable solution for PDM and PLM and for all of the questions being asked, they just stop at the high level question. I would like to take the time to dig deeper and get some quantitative answers to see just how well it works. To make the exercise worthwhile, I am seeking input from the community. Given that Zero Wait-State does a lot of Agile Engineering Collaboration and DesignState integration activities, using it as a platform seems reasonable but we need to make sure that the tests we perform will stand up to a reasonable volume of object creation within Agile such as design objects, parts, change orders and attachments.

Data Recovery attempts to back up each virtual machine in a defined backup job once a day during its backup window. If the backup timeframe for the backup window passes while the backup is in progress, the backup is stopped. The backup restarts when the backup window opens. As long as you have a sufficient backup window and a performing infrastructure (speed and capacity) then this is a great solution as the recovery time is extremely quick

This is the fourth post in a series about leveraging virtualization for the purpose of hosting an Agile PLM environment. This post walks you through the setup of VMware's Data Recovery appliance and plugin so your efforts aren't wasted. I am basing the series on a development instance of Agile PLM 9.3.0.2 that I need for testing. Thus far we have looked at:

• "Going Virtual with Agile PLM… Don’t Be Scared (Part 1)" which provided a series overview and included the first screen cast on how to create a virtual machine template of Windows Server 2008 SP1
• "Going Virtual with Agile PLM… Provisioning and Preparing the VM (Part 2)" which created our working virtual machine and got the operating system all ready for the installation of the Oracle stack
• "Going Virtual with Agile PLM… Installing the Agile Stack (Part 3)" covered installing the entire Agile PLM 9.3.0.2 stack along with AutoVue 20

I must confess that I am not nearly as familiar with Siemens-UG as I am with Parametric Technology and Oracle. Teamcenter is a major player in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) space particularly in engineering collaboration and they also have a strong presence in the automotive industry but I was surprised to see that their PLM website is second only to Oracle for traffic and they grade out quite high for search engine optimization. However, from a user perspective once I clicked over to their site I was confronted with the electronic equivalent of a brick wall. They have some very good content buried in the site but their navigation options are somewhat limited. They suffer from the same challenges as the other mega vendors like Oracle, PTC, and Dassault in that their site tries to be all things to all people and ends up suffering from the effort. UG has several different products featured on the site including NX, Solid Edge and JT. The attempt to try and provide information on all of these different product lines at the same time creates some challenges for those looking for specific information. There are also limited mechanisms to provide feedback or to interact with the company. If I had not chosen the brick wall analogy the other thought that came to mind was a one way street. This blog will reveal the resources that Siemens provides for learning more about their technology. Overall from a content perspective there is some very good information on the site; getting to it is the challenge.