PeterSchroer - Monday, January 14, 2008 11:02 AM:
Hello and Welcome to the CM community project.
Some background information for anyone new to Aras Innovator:
Aras Corp has been selling PLM and CM enterprise software solutions since 2000. In 2007 we decided to stop selling the software, and switched to an open source business model. The software is now free, and Aras sells only services, which are optional. Anyone may use the Aras software solutions for no charge, and if they need help with deployment, there is a company (Aras!) standing behind the software with a help desk, implementation consulting, and optional hosting solutions if IT does not want to install Aras Innovator on-site. Anyone who has not downloaded and installed should do so at www.aras.com.
About the CM Community Project:
Aras Innovator has already earned a CMII 4-star certification, and is in production use at many companies as the CM system of record. Our goal with this CM Community project is continuous improvement. We want to keep growing the Aras Innovator solution to adapt to new best practices in CM, add useful reports, new workflow process maps, and utilities that make the work of CM easier.
For example, Mike Gavlak at Delphi gave us the Impact Analysis Wizard (which can be downloaded from www.aras.com/CommunityProjects) which greatly simplifies the where-used analysis of changes. Mike has another idea for a better cost impact analysis on Change Requests that I will be helping him to package in the near future. Terry Quan has an excellent idea for automatically creating ECN implementation project plans with resource planning and scheduling.
I am open to suggestions on how the CM Community would like to organize itself and run the project, and I suspect this will evolve over time. Feel free to post comments, ideas or even just an introduction to yourself and let us know what you are working on in the field of CM. You can enable email message notifications on this forum so that you will be notified whenever someone posts.
