At the end of the meeting, the designer goes back to his desk. A few minutes later, his e-mail client chirps; he has just received the “package” from marketing, with Word and Excel documents, as well as some CAD files.

Before KollabNet, he would have taken out his yellow pad, and started to read all the documents, making notes of what seemed to be important items as he went.

But with KollabNet, he doesn’t need the pad. Instead, he opens KollabNet, and creates a new DesignMap. As he encounters a dimension, a critical temperature, a power constraint, and so on, he links them to the DesignMap.

KollabNet will keep track of each item—and remember where it came from. In fact, if someone tries to change the source document, they will either get a message saying, “This item is controlled by KollabNet,” or cause a message to be sent to the designer, informing him that something has been changed depending on privileges.

KollabNet keeps track of all changes, not just the latest ones. So that any item, or the entire design, can be “rolled back” to an earlier state at any time.

KollabNet brings it all together. It lets the design group capture the entire design development process, from customer requirements, through initial design and exploration of alternatives, all the way through quality assurance. With minimal user input (largely to establish linkages through ‘point-and-click’ actions), it keeps track of thousands of facts and events, and signals the user when something important happens.

For example, while designing that transponder, the user might violate a height constraint that was in the customer’s original specification. KollabNet pops up and tells the user about the violation, then allows the user to deal with it; offers to notify others who might be affected by it; or just remember it for later.

KollabNet’s “recollection” goes beyond the boundaries of the current project; it is truly an enterprise application. Each time an engineer faces a new design challenge, KollabNet alerts him or her to relevant prior knowledge in its knowledge base. They can examine the very thought processes of others, as they review both what the others did, and their rejected design alternatives. KollabNet keeps engineers from going down “dead ends” that have already been explored.

Every change in the design can be tracked back to initial requirements. You always know what was done, when, by what authority, and why. There is no requirements-capture system that keeps track of things like KollabNet does. And it does it with very little effort on the designer’s part.