SolidWorks:HEARD! - Episode 436 - Kenesto Community

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Kenesto Community:

This podcast covers the free Kenesto Community, a cloud service that brings business process workflow and social interactivity into one hosted community.  Kenesto came on the radar a couple years ago at SWW 2012 but was still under beta at the time.  Topics covered:

- What does Kenesto Community do?​

- What are the costs of the business plans and what do they offer?​

- The feature list and how it blends workflow with social.​

- Use cases and highlights

- Overall impressions

​I had heard about Kenesto in the early months before SolidWorks World 2012 in San Diego, CA and that Mike Payne, long time CAD pioneer, was taking the PLM and business process automation (BPA) to the cloud.  The early promises were to take the infrastructure load off of customers and centralize this automation in the cloud. 

I first saw the product at their booth in the SolidWorks World Partner Pavillion where I got a demo and a more concise description of their goals and product roadmap.  Since then the product fell off my radar since the launch was not quick and it appeared that the beta was going to take some time.  ​However, earlier this year there was a shift when Kenesto brought on Steve Bodnar from Autodesk to head up products and marketing.

This year (2013) they are now expanding upon their hosted workflow and integrating a social layer and "Freemium" model to get users familiar with the service.  Kenesto offers collaboration and discussion around tasks, documents, workflows, links, forms and a number of other aspects important to project/process management.​

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SolidWorks:Heard! - Episode 289 - SolidWorks Enterprise PDM Landscape

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SolidWorks Enterprise PDM Landscape:

This podcast covers the general landscape of how SolidWorks Enterprise PDM addresses problems within the engineering process.  I am joined by Jeff Sweeney, Data Specialist at 3D Vision Technologies and we discuss the common problems we see while performing Enterprise PDM implementations.  Topics covered:

- Common reasons for EPDM

- How PDM is typically viewed by new users

- How to use PDM as an "in-process" tool

- Integration in SolidWorks

- Workflow and common automation actions

- Common integration with other enterprise systems (ERP/PLM/MRP, etc..)

- How replication works and is used

- Other EPDM ramblings from both of us! ;-)

Jeff and I have been talking about doing this roundtable for quite some time now and we finally got time where we were both available and not on-site doing installs.  Jeff is a Data Specialist and is a wizard in implementations and API so I thought there was no better person to "talk shop" about EPDM and the process of solving issues that are common in the change process around engineering.

This show outlines the landscape of what Enterprise PDM offers and how companies are using this tool to solve real problems and automating processes that govern their departments.  I wanted to avoid doing a feature/function focused show since that is not important to the overall product.  Jeff and I share scenarios that we come across while talking to customers and performing these installs.

I hope to have a followup show gettting into the best practices of setup so those of you out there either considering a PDM solution or have EPDM installed have an idea of what pitfalls Jeff and I have witnessed.  Let's face it, no company has perfect processes and there is no one product that will solve all problems (well within normal budgets!).  I look forward to the next time Jeff comes on the show.  You rock man, thanks! ~Lou

Remember to check out the SolidWorks: Heard! Blog and to follow me on Twitter, Facebook and THE HEaRD!