Who names these things?

Names can be a powerful thing. They can give you connotations of something before you know anything more about it.

Naming something poorly is often times a bad thing. The folks making the PDMWorks Enterprise must think there is an award for poor naming conventions.

Let’s start with the name of the product itself…the moniker PDMWorks gives users the feeling there is very little difference between PDMWorks Workgroup and Enterprise, except the Enterprise version may have a bit more in it, while in fact they are really two completely different products with different terminologies and architecture.

The name for the CAD client version was finally fixed with 2008. It used to be called “PDMWorks Enterprise for SolidWorks”, but you could use it for other CAD systems? So, so confusing.

The servers that act as file shares are called “archive servers”. In the IT world, an archive server is a machine whose whole responsibility is to hold a lot of data…data that is seldom used…for backups and errrr archiving! Thus archive servers are typically slow input/output machines. Exactly not what you want with an Enterprise archive server -with Enterprise you want machines with fast I/O because you are working with production data, data you want access to as fast as possible. [Your database server doesn’t need super fast I/O -it wants a fast CPU and as much RAM as it can get its hands on.]

What’s the point? I guess there isn’t one, I had a pretty hard time coming up for names for my kids, so perhaps I shouldn’t throw stones. Then again I didn’t give them names like “banana” or “skateboard” either.