Program Portfolio Management and Social Product Development Among First Offerings Built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010
NEEDHAM, Mass. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — June 7, 2010 — PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), The Product Development Company®, today expands Windchill®, its family of PLM solutions, with the announcement of several new and enhanced solutions built on the Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 collaboration platform.
Highlights
- Windchill PPMLink™ – A new program portfolio management solution that couples stage-gate methods with unique capabilities to aggregate program and product-related metrics, improving visibility and decision-making
- Windchill SocialLink™ – A new solution utilizing social computing capabilities to bring the collective wisdom of communities to bear on product development challenges
- Windchill Web Parts for SharePoint – An enhanced solution that consolidates critical information from Windchill and other enterprise systems for presentation in a familiar Microsoft SharePoint 2010 environment for easier, extended information access
- Windchill ProductPoint® – An enhanced solution, to address the specific CAD data management needs of small and mid-sized businesses (SMB)
Prior to the launch of Microsoft SharePoint 2010, PTC was invited to participate in Microsoft Corp.’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for SharePoint 2010. This provided PTC early access to SharePoint 2010, and was established to yield benefits for product development organizations in the form of enhanced executive visibility, wider-information access, and improved team productivity. Through increased R&D investment and active participation in the SharePoint 2010 TAP, these new PTC solutions are being announced weeks after Microsoft’s initial public release of SharePoint 2010.
“PTC believes in Microsoft’s vision around the SharePoint 2010 business collaboration platform for the enterprise,” said Jared Spataro, director, SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft. “The potential for PTC to deliver great product development solutions for customers, based on the SharePoint platform is demonstrated by the early success of Windchill ProductPoint and the release of these new PTC solutions, offering significant value to manufacturing companies seeking to improve product development processes.”
Windchill PPMLink
Windchill PPMLink extends Microsoft’s Enterprise Project Management capabilities with configurable stage and gate processes, and scorecards that aggregate traditional project management measurements with PLM-derived product attributes. Further, it allows each project team the freedom to choose its own solution for project management while facilitating comprehensive bottom-up metrics reporting.
In a December 2009 independent Forrester Research, Inc. report, “It’s Time To Revisit Portfolio Management For Product Development,” Senior Analyst Roy C. Wildeman stated that “Across the product life cycle, few processes have as much impact on a company’s product innovation efforts and financial performance as managing the R&D project pipeline and resulting new products.” He also stated in the report that “[PPM] applications can help clarify and align product development strategy with the core strategy of the business.”
Windchill Web Parts for SharePoint
Windchill Web Parts for SharePoint 2010 provides a single, consolidated view of product information by enabling SharePoint users to easily view, search, and edit Windchill data together with content from ERP, finance and other enterprise applications. Using Microsoft’s Business Connectivity Services, Windchill Web Parts for SharePoint 2.0 offers new and enhanced capabilities that expand the current search, assignment, and executive reporting features and take full advantage of the SharePoint environment.
Windchill SocialLink
With Windchill ProductPoint 1.1 and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, PTC first brought social computing features into product development applications. Now, PTC is announcing its development of a dedicated solution, enabling companies of all sizes to realize the value of social product development. Windchill SocialLink will combine social computing enabled by Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with a rich knowledge of product data, and deliver a modern user experience, seamlessly accessible across all PTC solutions. Content tagging, filtering, and activity feeds will automatically disseminate relevant knowledge quickly to product communities and “communities of practices,” self-forming groups united by shared professional interests. Uncovering and utilizing the collective wisdom of the crowd will enable faster and more-effective decision-making.
Planned capabilities and associated benefits of this new solution include:
- Community provisioning for information sharing and collective problem solving
- Dissemination of relevant knowledge to community members intelligently extracted from product content and metadata housed in the Windchill PLM system by way of activity streams
- Knowledge and expertise discovery , via personal profiles which are continuously updated based on PLM system usage
- Modern, engaging user experience delivered via a social toolbar offering connectivity to all PTC product development solutions
