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.

The front page of the site presents you with a four screen rotating slider that offers up some success stories and events. Clicking on these will lead you to forms requesting more information from you but this is a fairly common practice. They have news and promotions menu and some standard generic menus for training, partners and support. Then they have a series of drop downs where you can explore solutions by product line or industry or business role. PTC had something similar to this and really I am not crazy about this approach. It could be that my perspective as a PLM insider makes me a little jaded about this fluffy menu structure but I really prefer to be able to cut to the chase and get to demos and product information as fast as I can. One big flaw in my mind is that it was very difficult to find demonstrations of product or brochures on the site. After spending some time on the site I did find an extensive collateral library but it took a while.

I clicked through to Teamcenter on the "explore solutions by product line" menu and was taken to a page with a list of product capabilities. As you mouse over the capabilities an image appears in the box to the right giving you a short explanation. I thought this was a pretty neat way to highlight system capabilities. Having links to short demos or brochures or presentations and whitepapers on each topic would have improved this area immensely. This menu has the potential to be very strong if they back it up with deeper content. I would use it to link to other content on the site that is relevant to the topics listed. Bellow this area they have a link called "10 Minute Hot Topics". These are short videos that highlight some of the use cases for their software. I think this is very strong content and they ought to incorporate it better into the site via the product capabilities box. I also visited the "Interactive Guide to Teamcenter" which looked promising but the content was a little shallow but better than most PLM sites offer. Again this should be given more prominence on their site. After clicking through the menu structure at this level under product capabilities I was able to find some high quality demos on various topics but it was difficult to find them.

From a social media perspective Siemens /UG has virtually no presence that I could detect on Facebook and the Teamcenter groups on Linkedin are fairly small compared to PTC and Agile Oracle Groups. I think it would be worthwhile for Siemens/UG to more actively leverage these platforms. There is definitely no reference to social media sites on their website except in their blog which is buried under the "About us" menu. The blog is pretty good and covers a number of topics ranging from Solid Edge to Social Media to Mechatronics. It might be worth breaking it up into several different blogs based on interests and formatting it to encourage more interaction. There was definitely some interesting content on the blog but it seemed mostly one way and again it is buried in the site. They also could use a forum similar to PTC's new Planet PTC site. Building an area where users and prospects can interact with each other and the company itself is a smart move in today's web climate.

To wrap it up the longer I stayed on this site the more valuable information I discovered. I think from a content perspective this may be the strongest site I have reviewed so far but they have some serious deficiencies from a navigation perspective. The site is too spartan and the content is buried and inconsistent. They need to leverage some web menus to more prominently feature their demos and product information and might want to consider further segmenting CAD and PLM content. I can understand why the site gets so much traffic but I suspect the users might find it frustrating to have to work so hard to find the information they are looking for. A more comprehensive menu structure and some rotating graphical menus highlighting content would go a long way toward improving the site dramatically.