The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is your central hub for all things collaboration between you and your team. You can store files, share content and even do some design work all in your internet browser, along with a host of other powerful tools. However, with all of this design and social collaboration, there needs to be a way to filter through it to find a specific piece of information you are looking for. Whether you have been on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform since its launch or you recently joined to follow along with the SOLIDWORKS Forum, you know that one of the most powerful tools at our disposal are the 6W Tags.
The 6 ‘W’s’
The 6W Tags allow you to assign and search for content, based on the 6 W’s: Who, What, When, Where, and hoW. The tags let you acknowledge who is working on a project, what the project is, when its happening, where its happening, why you need it and how it all comes together. This means you can qualify (or unqualify) the information you are looking for in a more natural way rather than just a blanket search.
The real benefit comes from stacking these tags in a search on the platform. By selecting which community to search in (where), which type of content (what) and what year it was posted (when), we can take our search from thousands of possible results to just a couple. Going even further and providing a search term such as “monitor,” those thousands of possible results refine down to single result with the tags we were looking for.
>>Learn How to Be Even More Efficient with 15 Ways to Speed Up Your Design Process
Ways to Tag
Almost everything on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can make use of the 6W Tags to make it easier to organize the content stored there. Content created using the 3DSwym App (Posts, Ideas, Questions, etc.) is the easiest to tag with a simple hashtag in the body of your post.
Any kind of design data that is uploaded to a 3D space or drive can be tagged as well to ensure the correct attributes are assigned to them. Even non-design data, such as simulation results or Office documents that are stored on the platform, can make use of the 6W Tags. Additionally, collaborative tasks assigned to a user can have tags applied to them so it becomes easier to sort from project to project. Lastly, you can tag folders or entire collaborative spaces to ensure they get categorized correctly.
There are a few things that cannot be tagged on the platform. These are the things that would be hard to assign a natural tag to anywhere else since they do not contain any physical information, but rather act as shortcuts (such as bookmarks). In general, if its design data or information relating to the design data then it can be assigned a 6W Tag.
By utilizing these simple, yet effective, tags you can change the way you classify data by improving your organization and increasing search efficiency to find that data later. Mixing and matching the different types of 6W Tags can allow you assign blanket terms to data, such as when it was created and who created it, as well as more specific custom tags. In general, adding more tags allows for more refinement on the classification for a given piece of data and in turn makes it easier to narrow down a search later down the line. It is a lot easier to find a part labeled “UNC ¼-20 Steel Bolt” than it is to find the same part just by searching “bolt” without the appropriate 6W Tags.
If you want to know more about how utilizing 6W Tags can help improve your working efficiency with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, do not hesitate to reach out to an application engineering resource like TriMech!
Want to learn more about what the platform can really do ? We recommend you watch our on-demand webinar Get to Know the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform.
