Vuuch Announces Vuuch 4.5

June 6, 2011 - PRLog -- Sudbury, MA, June 6, 2011 – Vuuch, creator of the first enterprise social system (ESS) for manufacturers, today announced the availability of Vuuch™ 4.5. Like the conductor of an orchestra, Vuuch social technology allows all the various parts of a company to work together better. Vuuch delivers numerous benefits to product development teams, as well as across the enterprise, including improved time-to-market, reduction of risk in product development projects and better innovation for both current and future products.

“Many enterprises used to deal with complexity and risk in product development projects by using program coordinators – people whose jobs consisted of ‘chasing down’ the numerous people and things that a project manager needed to deliver a product on time,” said Chris Williams, CEO, Vuuch. “Today’s leaner companies have mostly eliminated this role and distributed those functions directly to individuals. This has enormously complicated the process for everyone involved. Vuuch 4.5 addresses the chaos that reigns in many projects with an easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy, affordable system. And because using Vuuch is easy and even fun, team members will use it willingly. That contributes to better products, sooner.”

New and improved features in Vuuch 4.5

Performance, scalability and security enhancements.

Vuuch 4.5 now runs on Amazon Web Services’™ Elastic Compute Cloud™ (EC2™) cloud computing platform. With this migration to EC2, Vuuch offers users enhanced performance, almost limitless scalability, significantly improved reliability and increased operational security. As a result, Vuuch users can expand Vuuch usage across their enterprises and around the world with the confidence that Vuuch will match their stringent performance expectations.

Vuuch 4.5 also now encrypts all data transmission to and from users’ browsers and to and from Vuuch plug-ins using the Secure Sockets Layer specification (SSL, also known as TLS or Transport Layer Security). The Vuuch server will negotiate the strongest possible encryption cipher with browsers for each session, up to and including AES 256-bit encryption. Users who attempt to connect to Vuuch 4.5 using a non-encrypted session are immediately redirected to a secure session. Vuuch 4.5 makes it possible for users to deal with important intellectual property issues in the product development process with the knowledge that it would take decades – if not centuries – for a man-in-the-middle attack to decrypt communications between Vuuch clients and the Vuuch 4.5 server.

Another benefit of this change is that users can also verify that their browser has connected to the real Vuuch 4.5 server by checking their browser’s address bar. Browsers vary in the way they present authenticated sites to users in the address bar, but all modern browsers indicate a secure, authenticated connection in some way in the address bar. Now, with a quick visual check users can be certain they are communicating with Vuuch 4.5 and not a “phishing” or malware imposter.

New functionality and usability enhancements in Vuuch 4.5

Vuuch 4.5 offers many new and improved capabilities that streamline the project management and product development processes, including:

A new Home page with activity streams and RSS feed capability.

Vuuch 4.5 features a redesigned home page that now offers an activity stream. The Vuuch 4.5 activity stream is a time-ordered list of changes to the projects and deliverables the user is involved with. Unlike consumer social networking sites and their business-targeted clones, Vuuch 4.5 activity streams are specific to the projects and people that the user is currently working with. By “narrowing the focus” to just the things the user cares about, Vuuch 4.5 eliminates the need for users to manually filter the social system’s content to get value from it.

Starting with Vuuch 4.5, users are able to take advantage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to have Vuuch events sent to any RSS-capable client.

Available in apps like the Pulse RSS reader for iOS® and Android®, Vuuch 4.5’s RSS capability delivers a new level of real-time awareness to the project team. Vuuch 4.5 offers multiple RSS feeds, including feeds for specific deliverables and for product structures.

Improved end user access and functionality.

Vuuch 4.5 offers users many new ways to interact with each other and the team to reduce project risk and coordinate product development. Now, users may attach any kind of content to a Vuuch page, enabling a “social collection” of all content about a specific deliverable, including notes, files, links and who is or has been involved with that deliverable.

Email – a crucial part of team interaction and a way to include suppliers and customers in projects – has been used in Vuuch for notification and to permit replies to be added to activities. In Vuuch 4.5, the email format and text has been streamlined to make it easier to tell at a glance which part of the project the message relates to.

Vuuch pages – the social collector of things the team cares about during a project – can now be archived. Vuuch 4.5 page archiving allows the team to avoid visual clutter while permitting the process improvement from previous projects to be applied to subsequent projects by simply recalling the archived pages.

Vuuch 4.5 can now help users connect with each other across the enterprise by suggesting potential contacts. Based on its understanding of the social nexus – that is, who is working with whom on which products – Vuuch can actually suggest additional users who might help make a product better or resolve an issue faster.

“Social platforms originated based on the recognition that people — customers, employees, business partners, and suppliers — emerge as the most valuable assets to business and require informal, unstructured and easy-to-use communication tools that scale beyond a team for enhanced productivity,” said Sanjeev Pal, research manager, Product, Project and Portfolio Management Solutions,  IDC Manufacturing Insights. “To realize the real benefits of social computing, PLM end users need to adopt a specialized social platform that provides task-oriented, structured innovation and follows the various processes involved in the life-cycle management process.”

Pricing, availability and supported systems

Vuuch is available as an annual subscription. Users who create Vuuch pages and activities require a paid license. Other users may update pages and activities without a paid license. Pricing is $300 per year per Vuuch creation subscription.
Vuuch 4.5 runs in the cloud, so there is no installation or setup needed. The Vuuch 4.5 web application supports major browsers, including Microsoft® Internet Explorer®, Mozilla Firefox® and Google® Chrome®. The Vuuch web application also supports Apple® iPhone, iPad and iPod touch mobile browsers. Optional Vuuch add-ins allow team members to access the Vuuch enterprise social system directly from within Microsoft Office® 2007, SpaceClaim™, SolidWorks®, Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Autodesk Inventor® and Pro/ENGINEER®.

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Vuuch (www.vuuch.com), the first enterprise social system (ESS) for manufacturers, is revolutionizing the way products are developed. Vuuch’s social software is the only manufacturing-specific social technology that connects product development teams together with their deliverables, cutting time-to-market and the cost of developing products while improving quality and innovation. Founded in 2009 by a team of CAD and PLM industry veterans, Vuuch’s people-centric PLM capabilities offer manufacturers a new way to improve productivity that is compatible with existing investments in CAD, PLM and desktop applications. Vuuch is privately-held and based in Sudbury, MA.