The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform is a place where everyone on your team can collaborate for successful design results. To help demonstrate this, we are going to walk you through a  project where we will make various changes to a design and package it up to show stakeholders. Today, we are kicking it off by setting up our SWYM (Say What You Mean) Communities.

Think of a SWYM community as a message or project board. It is a place where the entire team, from concept to final production, can communicate on a project. Easily align sales, marketing, engineering, production, shipping, all to a common goal. Since SWYM communities are project boards within the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, they are geared toward a design environment. This makes them better suited as project boards than other tools available. Let’s get started!

See the below video for the full walk-through of our kickoff with SWYM!

Watch full video playlist.

In this article:

• Adding the 3DSWYM App to the Dashboard
• Creating a Community
• Creating a Group
• Adding Members to the Community
• Adding Content to the Community

Adding the 3DSWYM App to the Dashboard 

We start by creating a new tab on the dashboard, which we will label “Communities”. After creating the tab, we access the compass and drag and drop 3DSWYM from the list of apps onto our blank tab. We will access all our project communities in this app, along with creating our new community.

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Creating a Community

Now that we have the app in our dashboard, the next step is to create our saw design community. The list of communities is on the left-hand side of the app, along with a link to Show All.

Selecting Show All will open a screen with all the communities available to my user. There is a + in the upper right-hand corner that will allow me to create a new community. All that is needed to create a community is a title and a description.

When creating a community there are three levels of access available: Public, Private and Secret:

• Public means that anyone in your company can see this community. They have to be part of your company and invited to your platform. It is not available to anyone on the entire platform. So this is public within your company, not public for the entire domain.
• Private means that anyone in your company can see the community when they select Show All but they will need to ask for permission to view the community.
• Secret means that a user has to be added as a member to even see that the community is there, but once added can see all the content in the community. For our saw project, we will create a secret community and invite all project members. We will also create an Idea Funnel so the team can share ideas for the project and eventually turn those ideas into a plan.

Creating a Group

Before we get started adding members to the community, we will create a group with the design team. This way, when adding them to the 3D Space, the Community and any place else needed, only one entity will need to be selected.

After selecting User Groups from the compass, you can simply add a new group and add the users to the group. This group will now be available to select when adding members to the community.

Adding Members to the Community

Since the community created is secret, we will need to add any members that need access to the content. This is done through the members link on the right-hand side. This will list all the members of the community and their access level. Members can be added to the community with the + icon. The access levels are Contributor, Author and Owner:

• Contributors can create questions and ideas.
• Authors can create any content.
• Owners can create any content, as well as control membership and idea status.

For our saw project, we are adding the design team as well as a few sales and marketing members.

Adding Content to the Community

Now that the community has been created and the team members have been added, we are ready to start adding content to the board. Adding content is simple. When adding content, you just select the type of content you wish to add. The most common are posts and media. A post can be viewed like a discussion and media is used to store videos, images and even 3D Models. Anyone on the team can spin and interact with these models using 3D Play, embedded directly in the post. You can also create wiki pages, ask questions of the team and create tasks right from within the community.

In the upper-right corner of the community, you can filter content. This allows you to sort on a specific type of post. If you want to only see ideas, simply click on the idea icon. This is an easy way to narrow in on what you want to see.

Finally, the drop down will allow you to subscribe to content added to the community. You’ll always get notified if someone replies to a post in which you have participated, but subscribing ensures you see any post added, whether you participated or not.

The community will be the backbone of communication for our circular saw project. The entire team can use this as a method to discuss design ideas, keep on top of what is happening and contribute to the direction of the project. We can also ensure that any members added to the team can be brought up to speed quickly.

Have you been invited to a 3DEXPERIENCE project yet? If you’ve never used the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and you don’t know where to begin, watch our on-demand webinar below to help get your started!