UGS says new solution will broaden the product design community

In an attempt to feed the growing desire for sharing product-related data with non-engineering groups, UGS PLM Solutions has created a version of its Teamcenter product-data management (PDM) application that runs inside the Microsoft Office suite.

The new product is called Teamcenter Community. William Meredith, VP of Teamcenter Global Services, says this application is "very IT friendly" because it allows companies to give additional users access to product-related data for roughly one-tenth of the price of a full Teamcenter Enterprise license.

Meredith says UGS programmers created the new solution by taking the visualization and data-sharing functionality of the full-blown Teamcenter suite and making it compatible with Microsoft's new Windows Server 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server products.

"The core of Teamcenter—with the full PDM, requirements management, and related functionality—remains in the J2EE environment," Meredith notes. "But our customers have said they wanted to move collaboration capabilities out to every desktop. They also wanted those capabilities on an industry-standard platform like the Office environment."

To use the new product, companies must purchase a copy of Microsoft Office that includes Windows Server 2003 and SharePoint Server and then install a copy of Teamcenter Community on that platform. The type of collaboration that takes place with Teamcenter Community will depend on the type of licenses a company buys (see table).

A pilot project involving roughly 400 users has convinced Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati-based consumer products giant, to use Teamcenter Community as the primary platform for reviewing proposed designs for new product packaging. "The beauty of Teamcenter Community is that it is a Microsoft application," says Tom Massung, P&G's associate director of IT business solutions. "Teamcenter Enterprise has the muscle and scalability to do everything we need, but sometimes it is not as user-friendly as we would like."

Massung also says results from the pilot project indicate that P&G could easily cut its design review cycle times in half by using Teamcenter Community as its standard collaboration platform. "It saves people getting on airplanes," he says. "And once we complete a design review in Teamcenter Community, we can transfer the data directly to Teamcenter Enterprise and advance it through the formal approval process."