EDS Expands PLM By Collaborating With MicrosoftEDS Expands PLM By Collaborating With Microsoft

EDS said Tuesday that it's expanding its Product Lifecycle Management offering with the launch of Teamcenter Community in a collaborative environment with Microsoft. The IT services firm says the move will extend the usefulness of PLM to a wider audience.

"This will allow the Teamcenter Community to extend the reach of PLM to users that were previously unable to access that knowledge in a convenient way," says Bill Meredith, VP of Teamcenter marketing and global services at EDS. "We've bridged the gap. We can leverage what Microsoft has done to provide the most robust environment that is showing up on people's desktops with fundamentally better collaboration tools."

In the past, EDS's PLM Teamcenter Community has primarily been limited to use with Unix server environments. But as Microsoft is expanding in its use across applications, customers have asked for a dual strategy to meet the growing use of a Windows environment, he says.

"The essence of the Teamcenter Community product is around helping a much broader set of people that either on a regular basis or occasionally need product information," Meredith says. "We can allow them to connect together and work together on creating the best product possible." The new Teamcenter Community will let users access EDS's PLM solutions in a common Windows- and Office-based environment, he says, without having to leave their native Microsoft work environment.

The solution extends Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, a part of Microsoft's Office System, with PLM-specific enhancements, Meredith says.

Meredith says EDS has several beta customers working in the Microsoft-based Teamcenter Community environment and expects significant customer adoption through year's end.