Milestone vs. In-Progress

Since there’s a mountain of evidence (Search this blog for “Do you want to manage engineering”) that an engineering specific repository is necessary to support the complexity of engineering content management, engineering content review and engineering content publishing, some EDMS vendors will admit that they cannot provide all of the capability of ProjectWise, but that their systems can provide some percentage of the functionality that ProjectWise provides. Regardless of the estimated percentage, it’s the view of this author that the percentage is virtually zero.

How can that be, especially if an EDMS vendor partners with a third party to provide some CAD integration? Because without the deep application integration (In the areas of engineering content management, review and publishing), the engineering team can only use the EDMS as a milestone system. This leaves the engineering team working unmanaged while the work is in-progress. In most cases the decision on when to post information to the EDMS system is left with the user; who will also need to distill, or “dumb down” the information they are using into some simplified form the EDMS can handle.

Clearly a better bet is to use a system purpose built for EIM.