enabling people to communicate

Customer Business Profile

As world leader in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, the Dassault Systèmes group brings value to more than 70 000 customers in 80 countries. Pioneer in the 3D software market since 1981, Dassault Systèmes develops and markets PLM application software and services, which support industrial processes, and provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to retirement. Its offering includes integrated PLM solutions for product development (CATIA®, ENOVIA®, DELMIA™, SMARTEAM®), mainstream product design tools (SolidWorks), and 3D components (ACIS®) from Spatial Corp.

Software partners include IBM, MSC Software, Nihon Unisys Ltd., Hitachi Zosen Information Systems co. Ltd., LMS International, ESI Group, Microsoft, Intel ,Volvo IT and others.

Dassault Systèmes (3DS) is listed on the Nasdaq (DASTY) and Euronext Paris stock exchanges. Total revenue was €754,8 million in 2003. Dassault Systèmes has 4000 employees and has its headquarters located in Suresnes, near Paris.

Online Initiatives

Dassault Systèmes has coined the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) strategy and consequently planned to roll out a website explaining the strategy and the Software systems involved in this concept. Each of these Software Systems, like CATIA® comprise up to 200 individual products.

The previous PLM Website only held information on the general concept and on the different software “brands”, but no details about the products.

The information about these brands and the products was previously produced and maintained in Office formats, which should be used in a single source approach to be automatically made available as content for the new website.

In order to support the establishment of the PLM-strategy and to provide comprehensive information on its portfolio of products from 3DS and third party vendors, the new PLM website should present all of this existing information in a meaningful and easily-accessible way, while maintaining full control over the website’s layout.

The existing Content Management Application demanded the creation of XSLT-definitions for each display, which took too much time and was too complicated for the four-person web team experienced in Photoshop-based Design and HTML-Programming.

A new content management system should ideally support the preferred workflow and intelligently integrate XML-sources. The enrichment of this data for web publication as well as precise control over layout including integration with animated flash objects via XML were further requirements. It should also be capable of managing thousands of images for the website to be searchable and categorizable by editors.

Benefits

Challenges

The Business Fact Sheets (BFS) containing the information about products are created and maintained by various parts of the organisation. There are some 450 fact sheets which are stored in XML, enabling the information to be used for all purposes (incl. print and web presentations). The data contained herein should be used as the single source of information, and only parts of it are to be replicated in TYPO3 to allow for database operations for searching and ordering the information.

Again, this information serves as the basis of the information to be enriched, and finally displayed on the web.

The design layout of the website defies the traditional approach of columns, but is rather defining zones, which are containers for highly customized content blocks.

These content elements are designed in Photoshop and can be exported as templates. These templates should then be made available within the TYPO3-network in an easy-to-use manner.

The many images stemming mostly from screenshots of Dassault Systèmes’ CAD/CAM software, have varying formats and resolutions. These assets need to be indexed and categorized, so that the assignment of these resources to content elements remains safe and easy to use, regardless of the amount of images in the system.

Software Decision

None of these challenges could be met by the former content management system sufficiently, or in some respects, at all. The search was on for a new tool to solve most of the problems and offering the flexibility to be customized to the web team’s specific needs and requirements. In 1999, an internal benchmark including Documentum and Vignette Storyserver was set up. Later on, a consulting company was hired to benchmark a greater selection of solutions with the result of recommending TYPO3 on the following grounds:

Vincent Picou, IT Manager of Dassault Systèmes, contacted Kasper Skårhøj, the inventor of TYPO3, and invited him to the company’s headquarters in Suresnes, near Paris. During 2003, this turned into a close partnership with Kasper Skårhøj and TYPO3 core developers, who have jointly created a seamless content management suite tailored to fit the needs of 3DS.

Thereby, the system has become Dassault Systèmes' quality web platform and will be deployed for all other websites in 2004.

“We hoped we could benefit from this great system and at the same time give back to the project. It has truly proven to be a win-win situation for us: We have received all the functionalities we wanted at a fraction of the licensecost commercial offerings not matching our requirements would have incurred” concludes Vincent Picou, adding “Despite widespread scepticism about working with an opensource community, we have experienced very professional services and truly innovative solutions.”

PLM XML Single Source Content Management

XML is used as a single format for exchanging product information within the company and is used as the basis for multipurpose processing into all presentation formats, including print and webpages.

At first, the data structure of the Business Fact Sheets (BFS) was matched with the planned presentation format. Consequently, a module for managing the import of certain parts of the fact sheets for performance reasons from the native XML-Format was devised. These parts are used by TYPO3 for creating the page tree structure of the product section and for indexing and search usage.

The bulk information is included in the website on the fly from the actual XML-source files. The backend interface allows various checks of the syntax and completeness of the source data.



PLM Website Module XML to DB View


PLM Website Module XML to DB Import with XML view of one BFS source file


As seen above, the records are stored in a specialised application developed in the TYPO3-framework. This also means the data is not organised as actual pages in the TYPO3-system, but rather simulates a page tree-structure in the front end by brand, products, by industry and other relations of the data.

The navigation of the product section, as well as the overview, list and detail views are thus created automatically from the data that is centrally stored in the product records.


An automatically generated list page within the products & solution-section, with dynamically generated flash header, referenced icons, etc.


The editors of the website need to create references between products and case studies, and to do other tasks of content creation relative to the information imported from the BFS-Sources. These are meant by enrichment and can be conducted respectively in the front end, or the backend.

In order to simplify this work, the editors can edit the data in the website itself, in the so-called front end-editing mode, despite the fact that these pages are only simulations based on database relations within the PLM-application.


enrichment data entered in the front end of the website for the element “related products”.


Alternatively the backend is still allowing for search and editing functions in a more comprehensive mode.

TemplaVoilà Templating Interface

Contrary to standard websites, the Dassault Systèmes PLM Website was designed with a different layout concept. The page content area is divided into zones containing different formats of content elements that could not be organised into columns in a meaningful manner. This and the many varieties of the content elements called for a different and new approach that took over where the design process left off. Despite the already rich options for devising templates in TYPO3, a new option was created, fitting the particular workflow of this team.

The result is whimsically named TemplaVoilà by Kasper Skårhøj. What it provides to the creator of the website is a graphical user interface to define content elements visually by selecting elements from HTML-design files.

These content elements can then be deployed in the website.



GUI for creating a content object by defining elements from an example HTML-file by point-and-click.

This approach offers complete flexibility regarding the design and composition of blocks and zones combined with all the advantages of a dynamic database-driven CMS, while ensuring total control over the design by providing a purpose-oriented content production interface through forms. The system also offers the possibility to create rules governing the possible combinations of content elements per zone.



Webpage output and a form for a customized content element in front end editing mode.

The forms’ definitions are stored in XML-notation for easy maintenance and quick editing access, but can always be “re-mapped” from an altered HTML-file.

Generally it can be concluded that TemplaVoilà only takes a few minutes, rather than days, to achieve the task of adopting the design of an existing website into.

Digital Asset Management Module (DAM)

About 12 months prior to the involvement of Dassault Systèmes, the necessity of a powerful media management tool within TYPO3 had become apparent and TYPO3 developers had already devised a concept, a feature description and promising prototype versions for such a tool. The main objective here was to add database-stored metadata to any given media type, and make this information available for editors and applications in the system.

When Dassault Systèmes defined their requirements, it became obvious that the DAM would be the technology of choice to manage their images. Given the stage of development of the DAM at that time, it could be finished in a relatively short time span and be deployed in the PLM-installation.

The DAM system gathers three functional units:

The open concept of the DAM allowed for complete customization of the indexing routine and database tables holding the metadata of the assets. The conversion of formats from TIFF, PDF and many others is included by default within the TYPO3 framework for display in web-ready formats and image manipulation, such as resizing, conversion to grey-scale, orientation, etc.

“The aim for the DAM, was to create a powerful layer for most conceivable media management tasks, regardless of origin, format or end usage within TYPO3” says René Fritz, author of the module.

In the website itself, the images are assigned to the products by database relations and are automatically rotated from a pool of available material on every page impression. The detail view of the product screenshot displays a larger version and some more information from the DAM-database.



Product detail view generated from the DAM

Results

“With the TYPO3-Framework and the extensions that were created for us, we have received a 100% custom fit for our requirements and thereby achieved a great success for our marketing efforts regarding the PLM strategy” says Mehdi Tayoubi, Web Marketing and Communications Director at Dassault Systèmes.

TYPO3 succeeded providing a seamless integration with source material, while ensuring complete content and layout control and at the same time enabling swift and precise implementation of design ideas. The considerable amount of data is either maintained outside of the system in the basic source format used by product managers (BFS), or in the case of images, within the system in a powerful specialised application (DAM).

The job the web team can now concentrate on, is to create the website, not having to worry about accuracy of content now safely in the hands of experts, be they TYPO3 or human.

Benoît Pouyet, Web project manager for the PLM-Website, has come to value the opportunities created by open source and TYPO3 for the project:

“We found a complete and powerful backend to build and manage the already existing website. The partnership with TYPO3 developers has offered me the possibility to share my ideas and to influence the development of TYPO3 in order to fulfil our needs. We have had great benefit from the work of the community and have in turn aimed to make our contribution useful for everyone.”

Raphaël Theet, art director of the PLM-website adds: “I had an idea of what the website should be. TYPO3 quite simply made it possible to become a reality. The integrated workflow from my designs to the content production interface, including the possibility to devise rules for the combinations of the individual elements, has made it a breeze to maintain my design standards throughout the project.”

The PLM website was also selected by Macromedia, as "official Macromdia Site of the day" for it's "strong visual designs, superior functionalities, and innovative uses of Macromedia products" for it's flash bits integrated with TYPO3.

Consequently the plans for the immediate and mid-term future are ambitious:

“We intend to redesign the 3DS.com website with TYPO3 in 2004 and are to implement many new functions within the framework” says Mr. Picou.

“For TYPO3 as a project, the collaboration with a customer like Dassault Systèmes has made greater progress possible through the right combination of application-minded concepts and, in the meantime, relative freedom of technical implementation" ,summarizes Kasper Skårhøj. “ I firmly believe in this mode of cooperation in a situation beneficiary for the customer and the TYPO3 project, which is a great opportunity open to other similarly thinking customers as well.”

In 2003, Dassault Systèmes has become the most valuable partner for the TYPO3 project to date in terms of ideas and common objectives. It is already safe to say that 2004 will be another very productive year for TYPO3’s development, fuelled by partners like Dassault Systèmes.

The TYPO3 team is welcoming potential customers for relevant projects. Please direct your enquiries to contact(AT)typo3.com for further details on our services regarding professional consulting and custom software development.

URL: http://plm.3ds.com

Developers: Kasper Skårhøj, René Fritz, Robert Lemke, and Dassault Systèmes’ web team.

 

Copyright notices: Dassault Systèmes is retaining the copyright to all designs, the 3DS-Logo and images depicted here.

TYPO3 is copyright of Kasper Skårhøj

Photoshop is a trademark of the Adobe Corporation.

All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

 

© 2004 Daniel Hinderink