Sharepoint+as+PLM+trojan+horse.doc

此文档收集于网络，如有侵权，请联系网站删除Copyright 2007 Ash Bridge Media LLC. All rights reserved.The following article is protected by the copyright laws of the United States and 100 other countries. It is licensed to you for personal and business use subject to the following restrictions: -No copies of this information may be posted on any other Web site. -No copies may be sent by e-mail to any other persons. -Articles may be printed for personal use only.Violators may be subject to civil action and criminal penalties. Ash Bridge Media LLC. 7100 N Broadway, Ste 2P, Denver, CO, 80221 Telephone: 1 (303) 482-2813. Fax: 1 (303) 484-3610Microsoft SharePoint is a PLM Trojan HorseBy Rachael Dalton-TaggartPublisherOctober 11, 2007PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), the stated mission of the largest CAD vendors save one, is billed as a way to build more productive environments for product design, manufacture and retirement. PLM is also regarded by some as a misnomer; to be blunt, (in my words) marketing BS on the part of certain vendors. Autodesks Digital Prototyping strategy is the vocal party in this second group of vendors.Regardless of what you think of PLM as a nomenclature, or the various solutions available, we believe there is an urgent need for greater integration of processes and the data driving those processes, regardless of what you call it. In 2007 and onwards, there is no room for inefficiency in manufacturing, which has typically been caused by the inability to translate and transform 3D CAD and design data into something usable elsewhere in the process. Call it PLM, call it Digital Prototyping, call it something else. But manufacturers aiming to survive, and thrive, must have a plan and strategy in mind.At which point Microsoft SharePoint comes into the conversation. Why? Because at a conservative estimate of 85 million users, with a proven application that enables standardized file sharing, collaboration, revision control, and workflow process control, SharePoint has become a product of choice for millions of companies worldwide wanting to centralize their dataand then share it out. Manufacturers are no different. Chances are good that their globally distributed teams are using SharePoint for some part of their operations. It makes sense to have their PLM operations on SharePoint, too.Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides 6 functional areas for business productivity utilizing SharePoint Platform Services enabling partner solutions for industry relevancy.(click image for larger view).A number of CAD/PLM companies have been quick to recognize the SharePoint opportunity. In fact, we suspect that customer requests and demands probably initiated their decision to support SharePoint. Consider these existing CAD & PLM/SharePoint integrations: Two weeks ago Actify said its enhanced product search tools would incorporate SharePoint. The company previously established 3D CAD SharePoint-based viewing tools in its DesignShare product back in 2006 and is continuing to build on that. Informative Graphics announced Brava! Enterprise .NET 5.3 for SharePoint, where 3D CAD viewing and markup has been integrated with SharePoint 2007. Last week at the Autodesk Manufacturing Media Summit, Autodesk announced a plan to integrate its ProductStream data management product with SharePoint. UGS is regarded as the first company to realize the benefits of SharePoint, with integration several years ago. Bentley has integrated and supported SharePoint for some years now with its ProjectWise StartPoint product. And Simon Floyd, Worldwide Industry Strategist for PLM at Microsoft, says there are at least 15 other CAD vendors planning to integrate SharePoint with PLM and AEC solutions. The Attraction of SharePointMicrosoft SharePoint is a huge product. It is undeniably an enterprise product that meets many needs. It combines simple file sharing with collaboration, revision control, social networking, portals, enterprise search, content management, workflows and forms and management intelligence. It was started in 2000 as a general business application that was bundled with the Windows Server software, from which companies simply started to use it. Further enhancements in 2003 and 2007 made the product yet more powerful, and it has become a basis for many company operations, regardless of their vertical needs. It makes sense therefore, for manufacturing companies that use SharePoint, to desire their design, product data, manufacturing data and, ultimately product retirement data to be handled on SharePoint. I mean, who wants to invest in a totally separate PLM system for the products when you already have a functioning file collaboration system in place?SharePoint can grow with an organization offering increasing functional depth. For example, search can scale from team sites to also include data from external sources such as line of business systems. (click image for larger view).Even better, the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) now means that highly functional SharePoint servers are within reach of small and medium-sized businesses that previously could not afford this kind of business softwareas a subscription-based hosted service, SharePoint is now available to the smallest start-ups who need to share data.SharePoint works as a portal to share data of any kind. For the end-user, it is accessible via password-protected Internet browser; on both the internal server and hosted application versions it allows access from anywhere via the Internet. It boasts inherent revision control, check-in/out functions, and with its more advanced Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) provides content searches, business process automation, and business intelligence functions. All forms of SharePoint can manage integration with internal Wikis, blogs, Outlook, and many other tools of trade. In all, SharePoint is achieving many of the basic integrated functions that companies have desired.“SharePoint is excellent at presenting information in context according to a persons role. This makes SharePoint a strategy for the enterprise not just the department,” comments Floyd at Microsoft. “You get value and scale with SharePoint when it services multiple departments for example, design, procurement, manufacturing, legal, human resources, marketing, and so on. Anyone can navigate easily through SharePoint to get the information they need and do so securely.”The Problem With CollaborationUnfortunately, the idea of data collaboration has become clichd. (D definition says “a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse.”)Apparently almost any CAD-related product claims to assist with collaboration even when it does not. The trick is to understand that every company wants to centralize its data, regardless of the data type, without barriers, so that every authorized person can see itand in such a way that unauthorized access is not possible. To add a layer of complexity, proprietary CAD data does not always interoperate, so even if you can access a CAD file, it hasnt traditionally meant you can use it with any meaningfulness.Once you step past the clichand as a small business owner myself, I havethen the advantage of SharePoint becomes obvious. It provides all the basicand even some advancedcollaboration and workflow tools, which then free the specialized CAD developers to focus on the problems facing their customers: interoperability, specialized design workflows, attaching related manufacturing or building data, and so on.Floyd, at Microsoft, comments: “Our partners are very important to the success of SharePoint. Where we provide the common platform for document management, search, workflow, etc., they provide their deep domain expertise to deliver industry relevancy. This not only provides businesses with PLM-specific functionality and the ability to share that data across departments and roles, it also enables their IT organization to achieve economies of scale and benefit from the convenience of a common system.”It means there can now be one standard tool for collaboration across many levels of a company, while the money is found in the specialist tools that support a discipline on top of SharePoint.To emphasize the point, Joe Croser, Global Marketing Manager at Bentley Systems comments: “Many of our users have implemented SharePoint as a corporate standard. They want their teams to have a single source of truth for all project information. And they want non-CAD users to have easy access to architectural and engineering drawings. SharePoint adoption has been extraordinary. Now more than 85 million users worldwide are collaborating using SharePoint solutions. And fully 42 of the leading 50 firms in the Engineering News Record 500 now use our ProjectWise content management or publishing solutions.”The possibility of how proprietary PLM systems will be viewed in the future?. And proprietary data collaboration tools, which do not support something like SharePoint, take on the distinct image of a dinosaur.“In PLM/BIM it is an opportunity for the developers and partners to tell a bigger story,” says Floyd. “The trend for SharePoint as a collaboration tool is simply upward and businesses are rapidly embracing it. Similarly, more and more hybrid applications are becoming available, where the line is blurred between what SharePoint and another system does. This provides businesses with the best of both worlds: a secure, and stable infrastructure that businesses need and have come to expect from Microsoft and the deep domain expertise of our partners who focus on solving industry specific business and technical problems.”SharePoint as a ServiceTo make the scenario even better, SharePoint is ideally positioned to be delivered in SaaS form: using a hosting provider that sets up your SharePoint server and licenses, you pay a simple (low) monthly fee, and are able to access, manage and use SharePoint without needing a sys admin, in-house server and all the other hassles attached to business infrastructure. Simply do a Google search on SharePoint and see what comes up. There are many vendors out there. But most of them offer only basic Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Server 2007. Manufacturers will ultimately need additional tools to combine their product data collaboration processes, but at the same time, standard business data centralization can also occur.An example of how SharePoint interfaces with Autodesk Productstream displaying information in webparts that be searched or reused. The upper right hand corner features a DWF viewer from Autodesk for viewing 2D and 3D information associated with the part record in Productstream. SharePoint is accessed simply from a web browser. (click image for larger view).Floyd believes the true power of SharePoint will be proven out not just in the core tools of the product, but through hardware demands too. “The lightweight hosted model is here, and inherent in SharePoint, and it is changing users from client-centric, to server-centric. They want to access their work via a PDA when traveling or at home just as they would when in the office and are comfortable doing so. Obviously server-based products provide the basis to that. Also, CPUs are not getting much faster and software developers will have to find ways to work with stable clock speeds and with multiple CPUs with multiple cores spanning clusters of computers. Paralleled server-based products take advantage of multi-processor, multi-core systems well; delivering information on-demand that businesses need today and will need in the fut