An Overview of Vuuch
Vuuch is the first example of a new category of social software. Vuuch is an Enterprise Social System. ESSs are based on social networking technology, but instead of being for personal networking, they are specifically designed for product development projects. ESSs preserve all the ease-of-use of a traditional social network but they go beyond simply connecting people to each other. ESSs bind people and their work products together to revolutionize the product development process. Another crucial distinction between social networks and Vuuch is that Vuuch is domain-specific. Domain specificity means that Vuuch understands basic product development concepts, deliverables and workflows. Vuuch understands what the product development team needs to do and how it might want to do it. Vuuch combines social techniques with its domain specificity to create an enterprise social system.
Vuuch”knows” product; Vuuch “knows” people
One long-standing issue with collaboration systems is that because they lack any understanding of work being done, they have to be “set up,” “customized” or “programmed.” With Vuuch, this is not necessary because the system natively understands concepts like “product,” “project,” “CAD file” and “PLM objects.” In addition, Vuuch can live “inside” the tools the team already uses. (Click on the image below to see Vuuch working inside SpaceClaim.) What makes Vuuch social is that in addition to understanding product concepts, Vuuch knows how to link people to each other through those concepts. For example, Vuuch knows what people are needed to fix which issues in which components of the product. And Vuuch can dynamically alter these connections so that people who need to be involved can be added easily and those that are not required do not become deluged with irrelevant information from the social system.
Vuuch social technology works in the tools you already use
A social system with no learning curve
Technology fails when it requires product teams to change what they are already doing and/or when it is too complex. Vuuch has solved both problems. Learning the system is easy because there are only two ideas a user needs to think about, both of which are already familar.
* Vuuch pages: A Vuuch web page represents something the team is delivering. This can be a product, a part, a specific CAD model or any Microsoft Office document. General pages can be created that are not linked to a specific deliverable. A Vuuch page collects together information about the item it represents in the form of notes, the status of the deliverable, issues, tasks and discussions. People are invited to — or “friend” — Vuuch pages and in this way are always made aware of the current status of any item.
* Vuuch activities: Vuuch activities are threaded discussions that appear on Vuuch pages. Vuuch activities can be assigned to people and have a status. Vuuch activities can contain images and attachments to further explain what is being managed by the social system. Activities can also be dynamically assigned to new team members and assigned due dates. Over time, Vuuch activities become a true design history of the product and function as a searchable institutional memory.
Vuuch is incredibly easy for product development teams to adopt. To begin using Vuuch on a project already in process, teams may simply import the Excel spreadsheet they have been using for project status. Because Vuuch is social technology, team members already understand how it works — and so they become proficient in Vuuch right away.
