As hockey season reaches its compelling peak we here in Texas are glued to our TV sets watching every moment. Okay, I have to admit Hockey in Texas is not huge although with the constant influx of our Northern brethren it seems to be gaining popularity. In fact an Austin area team is competing this week for a minor league championship in their first year of existence. As usual you are probably wondering what relevance this has to PLM and engineering collaboration. Recently there have been a couple of good articles about Facebook and PLM. Jim Brown writes in his excellent blog "Tech-Clarity", about how Facebook is ill suited as a product development tool due to issues like protection of intellectual property, security and a lack of infrastructure for business process. He does acknowledge some value from Facebook and would like to see PLM tools adopt some of the features like status, links, blogs etc. Oleg Shilovitsky followed up that article with one of his own on his blog, "The PLM Think Tank" about Facebook's potential as a collaborative tool and the value of syndicated content. I think both of these articles are well written and thought provoking. Zero Wait-State has been experimenting with Facebook as a business tool as well. As both Oleg and Jim point out it has some nice features for sharing information but also as Jim points out it does also have limitations. The biggest shortcoming I see with Facebook is the fact that it is widely adopted as a personal tool for non business activity and that most people are reluctant to mix business with their private lives. There have been numerous articles about people losing jobs because of information they put on their Facebook pages and I have to admit even with our limited experience with Facebook as a business tool I may have learned a little more than I needed or wanted to about some of my partners and clients. Overall for us the main problem with Facebook has been a lack of adoption by our clients more than anything else. Linkedin is another tool used in social media but it is exclusively a business tool. We have had much more success with this platform in our attempts to collaborate with our clients. While it does not offer all the capabilities of Facebook and does not approach the number of users Facebook has it is still a very robust platform and offers a lot of potential as a supplemental tool for PLM. In this article I will contrast the two platforms for collaboration and PLM and how they might be enhanced to better suit product development organizations. So let's drop the puck and let the faceoff begin. Hopefully we can avoid "high sticking".

The fan page is where Facebook concentrates most of its capability for business. It is possible for people to become a fan or "like" a page. This mechanism has been used for a lot of silliness with fan pages for things like "Chuck Norris can kill you with one punch to the face" and "She has a pretty voice oh wait that's Justin Beiber" but also a lot of corporations now have a Facebook presence. Zero Wait-State, Dassault, Oracle Agile PLM, Siemens UG, and PTC all have fan pages. Mostly what companies do today with Facebook is to use it as a way to communicate information about products and events. It does give users a platform to express themselves as well but it just feels like a high end forum. There is no way to segment fans into groups to direct content and control access to information or data. One good thing about fan pages is that it is one way. No information is shared from anyone who "likes" your fan page. There are applications for blogs, maps, video etc and the multimedia support is extensive but there is nothing I am aware of that would allow for viewing CAD data for instance. So overall there is opportunity for ad hoc collaboration on a very limited basis with a very limited data set. Beyond that I don't really see much value in Facebook in its current state. I do agree with Jim Brown that there are functions and user interfaces that could be adopted for PLM. One area that would be very nice is being able to set up project home pages similar to a fan page in Facebook and inviting specific people to the page and then being able to thread and serialize communication. This would give you something similar to Facebook's status communication and would be something familiar to most users. If we were to consider Facebook for serious engineering collaboration it would need to address the personal professional issue by setting up a separate area that is completely segregated from their normal content. There would need to be a way to restrict access to the content based on membership and membership would need multilevel control. There would need to be a way to develop viewer and markup technology for the environment which shouldn't be too difficult. If they added this support I think you would have a very useful tool that could be combined with most PLM technologies to provide a useful platform for collaboration as Oleg outlined in his article.

As I mentioned above Linkedin is another social media platform that is more suited for "business to business"(B2B) interaction. As a company we have had far more success leveraging this platform to communicate with our clients and partners. There is a good chance you are reading this blog via Linkedin. They have interest groups and the ability to create subgroups in which access can be controlled. Most professionals today have a Linkedin profile and are familiar with the interface. There are a number of applications available for Linkedin including blog interfaces, Slideshare, Twitter integration etc. All of the base elements exist to facilitate collaboration minus a few peripheral applications that would help with view and markup. Linkedin doesn't have the brand awareness and appeal of a Facebook as far as market exposure and publicity and it is not as widely adopted as Facebook. But based on the B2B results we have seen working with interest groups I suspect it is a much more accepted platform for the type of users we would encounter in product development. You would still have the serialization of content via the groups per Oleg's observations and most of the functionality Jim identified is available via this tool. You have the ability to create as many groups as you want and can invite whomever you choose to the group. In the faceoff of Linkedin versus Facebook that Linkedin has a clear advantage as a collaborative platform.

Both Facebook and Linkedin offer valuable solutions to help companies communicate more effectively. The interfaces are far more familiar to user communities than most PLM solutions. Projects can be very dynamic and communication and interaction needs to be adaptable which is not something most PLM tools offer. Using tools like Facebook and Linkedin to supplement PLM would give companies flexibility and provide a controlled platform for collaboration that could be tracked and monitored. Based on our experience with both platforms in the business space I believe Linkedin would be more accepted and offers more capabilities to become a product development collaboration solution. Facebook has more potential given the large number of users and the resources the company has to bring to bear if they felt it was worthwhile. The game is still in the first period but currently Linkedin has control of the puck and the early lead.[clear-line]