Making JT Mobile; a Conversation with Microsoft

There is no other topic that is hotter today than mobility. With the recent release of the iPhone 5, the rise of Android OS and the array of tablets available, mobile is a crucial subject for every industry, including PLM. Last week at the 2012 JT Open International Conference in Barcelona, Spain, we were given the opportunity to hear from Simon Floyd, Director, Innovation and Product Lifecycle Management Solutions at Microsoft.

Simon is one of those people who has a “cool” job. He gets to play with all the toys. In May when I spoke with him, he was letting people try the Kinect technology at the Microsoft booth at PLM Connections. This time, Simon’s presentation started with reason’s why the JT community (and the PLM community) need to care about the mobile market. He shared some staggering (yet, probably not surprising) numbers:



So how does this transfer into the needs of a productive workforce? As Simon described it, he walked around his office and looked at the Microsoft engineers to see exactly what their needs were. Their needs were clear – productivity with a tablet, enterprise apps, mobile workstation, portable data access (the list goes on) and all within a secure environment. Beyond that, he thought about the needs of the JT Community in an enterprise setting such as managing software, performance and interoperability. The result is a new initiative that Simon and Siemens PLM have embarked on to bring JT mobile. Wait for it….dun-dun-dunnnnn:

Introducing JTVue for Windows 8

Now the name JTVue is merely a project name (that’s how new this is) so what you are seeing is a working prototype. As Simon said, he has no way of knowing what the needs of the JT community are so as this evolves, it will do so with the help of the JT Community members.

I was able to catch up with Simon after his presentation to have him explain exactly what is means to make JT Mobile.




Making JT Mobile with Simon Floyd

Simon was kind enough to share his entire presentation with us. Scroll through his presentation to see the test and validation procedure used, the vision and more about the development partner for this project. The appendix also contains additional slides on a demo, some of what wasn’t shown in my interview.

[slideshare id=14280864&doc=floyd-jti2012-jtvuefinalshare-120913165435-phpapp01]

If you are a JT Open member and would like to participate in the testing, or receive the source code, please contact Simon. His contact information is at the end of the presentation.

As a reminder, everyone is invited to become a member of the JT Open Program. Membership to the program includes access to the JT Open Toolkit. The toolkit provides a comprehensive JT read/write API.