Will Web 2.0 technologies drastically alter the way products are designed and developed? The answer is: Yes; well, maybe. In the product lifecycle management arena, two major technology vendors have very different points of view on the question. PTC, which recently launched its “social product development” concept, says that the marriage of social computing and product development is an important evolution in the way people work together. Its rival, Siemens PLM, agrees that social media is important, but says it’s just another form of collaboration and not necessarily a major change agent — at least, not yet. “More people are active in social media than they were a few years ago, and they are discussing its implications in their work environment,” said Dora Smith, director of global social media at Siemens PLM. “But it is really the same collaboration story we all have been telling for years, just with different tools.” Siemens PLM, for example, built Web 2.0 capabilities into its Teamcenter for Community Collaboration product, based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, back in 2007. Those features included wikis, blogs, discussion groups, and presence detection to enable users to quickly make contact with the right person. Just having these capabilities, however, isn’t enough. “Real social production will happen when companies change their business models to include their customers directly in stages of the lifecycle,” Smith said. And that has not happened yet, as the technology itself is still in an embryonic stage, she maintained. PTC, on the other hand, says there’s evidence that Web 2.0 is widely in play. “PTC has actually done research in this area with [our] customers, who are largely engineers, designers, CAD administrators, and IT directors, and it turns out that they are active with social media technology as it relates to their product and their business,” said Robin Saitz, PTC’s senior vice president of solutions marketing and communications. “We think our customers are ready.” In June, PTC announced version 5.0 of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire CAD software, which leverages Windchill content and process management software built on Microsoft SharePoint services that include social computing capabilities. In this setup, an individual could know who else is working on a specific model via presence detection, instant message alerts, or the use of wikis and blogs to spread knowledge across a virtual team — all without leaving the CAD application. Saitz said companies are demanding these new kinds of collaborative capabilities in order to cater to the next generation of engineers. “Social computing technology is vital for the incoming workforce, and [companies] know that they won’t be able to attract and retain new engineers unless they provide them with the tools that they have basically grown up on,” she said. The reality, however, is that though engineering departments see the value in social computing, there’s a corporate clamp-down in some places that discourages use. “I can see the potential. But organizations are trying to tighten security,” said Jack Beeckman, PLM manager at Emerson Network Power. “We just got another memo today saying people who have Skype loaded on their computer need to take it off because it’s not corporate-approved.” Beeckman is using Teamcenter’s community tool, but people are not tapping into its interactive power because the company can’t be sure social computing technology is not putting intellectual property at risk. “Corporate has to be sold on the idea and convinced they can maintain control of their environment without exposing themselves to the world,” Beeckman said.