This was the featured solution in July’s Newsletter and is an excellent add-on for companies with large, complex product structures like aircraft, automobiles, ships and other complicated electro-mechanical equipment.
The Alternative Structure Browser for large assemblies enables you to zoom in/out on deep structures, as well as, drag & drop the structure nodes so you can orient the data best for viewing.
That's just the beginning... now, the fun starts... you can click on a node (i.e. Part, Drawing, CAD model or other item) and see the description along with all the associated properties.
Then, you can drill down to the actual Part Master or the Document or whatever it is that you're viewing. As Yoann Maingon from Minerva France, the developer of the solution said in his blog about this solution, "This is really cool when you need to watch a drawing which is 4 or 5 level down in the BOM of a product."
For what it's worth, my write-up does not do this solution justice at all... this is the type of functionality that companies using Teamcenter and Windchill would kill for (and can't get)... you can see for yourself... there's a pretty amazing Video Demo below.
User security is enforced so people can only see & access the data and files for which they have permissions. So, you can have fancy features while keeping critical information secure.
The solution uses the Cytoscape web graph library which is a powerful open source platform for visualizing complex networks and integrating any type of attribute data.
There are more features on the way like saving layout change, new layout options, changing Item colors based on the Item's state, different Item shapes based on ItemType and more. Yoann states, "Many cool things allowed by the flexibility of both Aras Innovator and this graph library."
Please join me in thanking Yoann Maingon at Minerva France for creating this solution, and to get the solution you should contact Minerva directly.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBwOP4pi5LQ