Thanks for the good explanation. And PIM systems are used in conjunction with ERP systems to manage product-related data and then exchange that data across different sales channels.
From my opinion ERP is completely different here. ERP usually store product IDs and other operational product information. When PIM/PDM is focused only on product data and usually guys from marketing team is working a lot with PIM.
PIM is considered part of MDM, because MDM solutions can work in different areas like customers, addresses, etc. While PIM is only for products, so we can call it Product MDM.
In the world before centralized MDM systems which were independent of their other enterprise operational/transactional systems, some organizations treated the data in their core enterprise systems as "master files" (I'm talking about quite a while ago).
"The concept of master files was transferred to some corporate computers as early as the 1960s and gained popularity during the 1970s and 80s when computers became more abundant. Master files contain essentially the same descriptive data – such as names, addresses, and basic summary information – as master data. Master files continue to be used as a part of some system databases and were a precursor to master data." [1]
Not sure if for the last thirty years, but for the last 10 years when I work in this field I have been using PIM term. I agree that there are other terms that are synonymous like PDM.
Akeneo is undoubtedly the most famous open source PIM. But it's not completely free. There is a free version with fairly large restrictions. And the commercial version isn't cheap.
You are right that the site is primarily for technicians who need to implement a PIM solution. So it's useful for those who know they need PIM and are looking for possible solutions. We are going to improve this in future, but now we are targeting the people who is looking for small, easy and free PIM.
There are several free PIM systems available, and we just want to share information that there is another alternative.
While I with rodolphoarruda that you need a page that sells the product to the user, I applaud the existence of this page.
As the person often tasked with evaluating, approving and deploying software, a page like the one linked to in this article can turn a multi-day review process (or weeks if I have to keep asking their sales people to relay questions to the technical team I'm not allowed to talk to and then relay back half the information they think they understood from said technical team) into a couple of hours.
There seems to be a bug in firefox where clicking the arrow next to a heading in the tree menu causes it to animate but not actually expand the tree on first click. It works second time and every time after that. This happens again after a page reload.
