The communities tab is a useful tool for sharing ideas and a variety of files rapidly in one location.
Sometimes when working on a collaborative project, you need a space to communicate more fluid ideas, or to brainstorm without having to worry about structuring files or needing to get into modeling to convey visuals.
The Communities tab is contained within the 3DSWYM App, and is useful for sharing ideas, asking questions, brainstorming, and otherwise collaborating with people. Here you can share images or files, ask questions, create polls, and even build a wiki of information relevant to your project.
Within the Communities tab, there are several buttons that lead to different categories or ways of organizing content. We used the Community tab to help share ideas during a project where we needed to design and 3D print a device that would protect an egg from a falling brick.
You can set up a project to have a community tab by default, or you can create a new Dashboard and add a 3DSwym section on your own Communities tab to change the size, shape, and specifics of the app.
Post
By selecting Post, you can see the history of posts and uploads to the community space in a list, or feed format. You can comment on previous posts, allowing for discussion of ideas grouped with the ideas themselves.
A post is text-based, it can contain information, messages, guidelines, or anything else you may want to post. The post tool contains a text editor, allowing for quick text posts, or detailed, formatted posts to enable clear passage of information.
Media
The Media tab allows you to view all media that has been uploaded to the community space in a grid, as well as allowing you to upload a variety of media. You can share videos of simulation runs, quick whiteboard sketches, and more.
You can upload images, videos, and SOLIDWORKS files that you do not want to version or have within the project’s file structure. Useful for quickly mocking something up and sharing to provide a 3D visual where other users can get a better sense of a concept.
Idea
The Idea section is perfect for brainstorming, and quickly sharing ideas in one location, without having the loose ideas involved in brainstorming clogging the clarity of the other tabs.
Question
By selecting Question, users can ask open-ended questions, similar to Survey, however, users are able to answer themselves after being prompted, rather than being limited to selecting just a few options.
This allows for a wider range of responses, useful for prompting and gathering ideas.
Wiki
The wiki is very useful for detailed projects, especially longer-term projects where new users may need to be brought up to speed on certain aspects, or have reference material that you do not want to have buried somewhere in the feed of posts.
You can build your own wiki of relevant information, requirements, specifications, due dates, links to references, and any other key information you may want defined or explained.
Survey
By selecting Survey, you can create a survey, especially useful for larger teams or narrowing down ideas. You can create a survey where you can have users choose between different set options, useful for getting your team’s temperature on ideas, asking who is prepared for the next phase, or deciding on which design concept to pursue.
Conclusion
The Communities tab within 3DSWYM is a useful tool for more freeform idea sharing and brainstorming, as well as a place to share files without committing them to a bookmark and creating additional files to manage. You can ask questions, and share sketches, drawings, whiteboards, surveys, and even CAD files themselves. We used this to settle on a design, allowing us to collaborate, even if we were not all working simultaneously.