The
3DSwym application is at the heart of the 3D Experience platform and is the
gateway to collaboration within your business. It allows users to post ideas
and concepts and interact with them as things progress from concept to reality.
Ideas are just one type of post. There are lots of other types, including Surveys,
which allow you to quickly gather qualitative data to understand options and
help make decisions. Alternatively, Question posts can be added to get opinions from the people who belong to your communities. We will
touch on the other types of posts later on.
The 3DSwym app can be found in the north
quadrant of the compass. Alternatively, you will notice that the 3DSwym app can
be pinned to the “My Favourite” apps bar. If you double click the icon, it will
launch 3DSwym full screen, or the app can be dragged and docked onto your
dashboard.
Key Areas of the 3DSwym Interface
List of communities: Showing
communities you have created as well as communities you have been invited to
join.
Communities and Conversations: In this, you can toggle between the
communities page and the Swym instant messaging page to respond to people in
real-time.
Feed area: This is where you will see the latest community
posts. You can switch to see the latest from all communities by pressing the
“What’s new” option or pick a community from the list on the left. There is one
further option above the feed to change the view to content in a
timeline display (grouping threads together) or in time order where threads and replies are separated.
Quick filters: This row shows the icon for each post type,
pressing each will filter the feed to show that type of post, making it easy
to find the content you are interested in.
Request author
rights: This option allows you ask the owner of the community for further permissions. A breakdown of permissions will be discussed later in the blog.
Rights Access
The level to which you can
interact with content is limited by your rights access (assigned by the
Platform Administrator), the three rights access levels are:
- Owner: This user has
authority over all media in a community.
- Author: Can create any post
that has been approved in that community.
- Contributors: Respond to
content posted by others on communities you are part of.
| Activity | Contributor | Author | Owner |
| Post | Off
by default can be allowed by the owner, read any post in community | Create, read, update and delete own content | Create, read, update and delete any content |
| Media | Off
by default can be allowed by the owner, read any post in community | Create, read, update and delete own content | Create, read, update and delete any content |
| Ideas | Off
by default can be allowed by the owner | Create, read, update and delete own content | Status
of an idea can only be changed by an Owner |
| Questions | Off
by default can be allowed by the owner, read any post in community | Create, read, update and delete own content | If
an answer is, validated, only owners can update it |
| Answers | Submit answers to any
question post
| Submit
answers to any question post | Create, read, update and delete any content |
| Wiki | Off
by default can be allowed by the owner | Read
any content, depending on permissions can create, update and delete own
content | Create, read, update and delete any content |
| Surveys | Off
by default can be allowed by the owner, read any post in community | Read
any content, depending on permissions can create, update and delete own
content | Create, read, update and delete any content |
| Comments | Comment no any post type can update and delete their content | Create, read and delete their own content | Create, read, update and delete any content |
| Like | Like any post type, can delete own likes | Like any post type, can delete own likes | Like any post type, can delete own likes |
| Answer Rating | Can participate in rating answers from a question | Can participate in rating answers from a question | Can participate in rating answers from a question |
Viewing My Communities
Clicking the 3DCommunities
Icon will take you to the ‘My Communities’ page, showing all the communities
you are a member of. On this page, it also shows you the level of permissions
you currently have for each, the privacy level of the community and the
community owner’s name.
To create a new community, press the + icon from the My Communities page.
Once the title, description and owner have been
filled, it will take you to the community settings page.
This is where you can set permissions for post
types and allow contributors to create particular posts (turned off by default).
There is also the option to add more statuses to an idea funnel to better
represent your design process.
Adding Members to a Community
To add a member, simply start typing their name,
and it will provide a drop-down with their full name (this of course is based on whether the user has been granted access to the overall 3DEXPERIENCE platform). To confirm which user you
want to add, click on their name and they will be added to the list of new
members and their assigned role in the community.
Changing an Existing User’s Role
To change a user’s role simply click on the
arrow next to their name and this will give you the option to change.
Example posts
Below you will see an examples of different post types, notice in the image below how we can create a post with an @ symbol to send a direct notification to the user.
Standard Post
Standard post types are text-based. However, there is an option to add attachments by pressing the paper clip icon. A useful feature is mentioning/tagging a user. This can be done by using the @ symbol followed by their name. This will send a direct notification stating they have been mentioned in a post. Another useful tool is text font editing where text can be quickly changed to Bold, italic or underlined. Text can also be linked to a URL to help direct people to a website.
Media posts
This type of post gives the user the ability to
upload working documents such as Images, Video and audio files. A great way of
getting a lot of information across quickly. There is a large array of support
for various document formats.
The current file formats support can be found
below.
| Type | Functionality | Support File Extensions | Maximum Size |
| Image | Interact with models |
Jpg, tif, tiff, bmp, gif, png, jpeg
| 50MB |
| Video | View video within the post | Mp4, flv, wmv, avi, mov, mpg, mpeg, mkv, rm,
webm | 100MB |
| Audio |
Listen back to the audio with
in the post
| Mp3, aac, wma, m4a, wav, agg, ra | 10MB |
| 3D Model | Interact with models, share annotated pictures from
the post, section
view | 3ds, blend, u3d, dae, igs, kmz, 3dxml, stpz,
zae, prj, stl, vrml, stp, off, wrl, str, obj, step, ply, iges, sdm | 50MB |
| Document | Download document, Image preview of document | Zip, xlsx, rtf, rsd, vsdx, csv, mpp, docx, pptx,
ppsx, txt, pps, pdf, ppt, xlsm, doc, xps, xls | 50MB |
Idea Posts
A great way to progress the development of a
concept is by using idea posts. These allow you to progress concepts through
your company’s development structure, keeping them all in one place. When
setting up a community you have the option to change the status names/colours to match
your internal terminology.
Question Posts
Question posts are a great way of getting quick answers to questions and sparking discussions. Similar to a standard post but will be more engaging to obtain information quickly.
Survey Posts
For larger communities, a survey can be really useful as it will consolidate the opinions of the entire community/stakeholders into easy to understand information. Once created and answered you will be presented with visual representation of what answers were chosen.
3DSwym Analytics
The 3DSwym analytics tool allows you to view how the members of your community are interacting with the content available. This will help increase productivity, showing which content is being interacted with most, the people who are visiting the community most and break down the type of content that is being posted. This can all be exported into a csv/excel format for further review off the platform.
So
as we began this post, 3DSwym is at the very heart of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
No matter the project managed in the platform, the need to communicate is
always vital. Rather than disjoint email trails which may or may not include
the necessary people, the thread based community approach allows you to easily
find old discussions and track the decision making process.
By
David Dolding – Applications Engineer