Hello Community
After I have been to the ACE 2018 in Hamburg I thought it might be a good idea to make more use of the forum/community.
So I start with my first topic right here. Beforehand I have read through most of the forums. Unfortunately I found that the vast majority of the topics deal with specific technical questions and not with general topics. From the Heading this forum ("Community") seems the most general one so I post here.
We have introduced Aras Innovator 11 approx. 2 years ago as a replacement for our previous PLM System eMatrix which we had in use and customized/optimized for over a decade. Recently we updated from SP5 to SP11. We mainly use the parts/document/BOM/Change capabilities (I do not know the specific terms how the apps are called in Aras). As subscribers we also use the NX CAD integration (Connector from ITI).
As a lot of our users were so used to eMatrix, many of them visited the "valley of tears" thoroughly. Some are still opponents and would favour other tools due to user friendlyness and other reasons. (if only available)
Some months ago we also changed to Office 365 with all its apps and collaboration features (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams...).
Most of the users not yet realized this (as there was no real "introduction"/Training from IT side) and continue to see Office 365 as "Word, Excel, Powerpoint". Which was my viewpoint as well until I bite the bullet and tried to learn about the features...
Interestingly there is a 64 pages "Adoption Guide" available, I wonder how many companies have made use of it...
fto365dev.blob.core.windows.net/.../Office_365_Adoption_Guide.pdf
Yet some project leaders and opponents realized that SharePoint/Teams is a nice and easy way to avoid the obstacles of PLM and handle general team/product documents there, as also the chat like communication makes emails, shared documents and the like easy to access for the team.
If we take the so often cited "digital transformation" a significant portion (maybe not always obvious) of part relevant information is handled in MS Teams or SharePoint due to its easy and common user interface etc....Especially the chat-like communication is worshiped as there is no need to share emails etc. Currently the use of MS Teams is not really established but I think a "parallel universe" of information will build up which contradictes the idea of PLM.
Now to my question:
How is Aras addressing this situation? I believe we are not the only company with this topic.
Will there be some "Connector" to plug Sharepoint/MS Teams to the Innovator Platform?
Or is Secure Social the proposed solution to render MS Teams redundant? If the latter is the case: We just started to try it out but compared to Teams it is not really clear or userfriendly in terms of interface. Is there a proper documentation of intended usage and features available?
I am looking forward to some feedback or dicussion, hopefully not only from Aras but from end users/customers who might experience the same situation.
Best regards
Olaf
Hi Olaf,
the forum is monitored and you normally get feedback soon in very good quality when it comes to developer questions. I really like the forum, even questions that may sound boring at the first glance, may often contain useful information.
Nevertheless the forum is right now not very community friendly. We are not the first persons that would be interested into more collaboration options, but I think there are still not enough persons complaining about it.
The current spam flood is something new since around 1-2 weeks.
Mrs. and Mr. Spam start to work around 9am, and Aras will start cleanup around 3pm after the first coffee and email check.
A few days ago I would have said: "Before the next ACE USA, we will not see much improvement in the forum. It´s a thing of politics and priorities".
But even if our comments will not drive a faster improvment of the community area, maybe the current spam problem will. I am somehow "grateful" for the current spam flood, it´s so terrible, Aras just can´t ignore it. I think the Labs team is already highly annoyed. If this continues, I give them one week until they give up and rework the forum.
Hi Olaf,
the forum is monitored and you normally get feedback soon in very good quality when it comes to developer questions. I really like the forum, even questions that may sound boring at the first glance, may often contain useful information.
Nevertheless the forum is right now not very community friendly. We are not the first persons that would be interested into more collaboration options, but I think there are still not enough persons complaining about it.
The current spam flood is something new since around 1-2 weeks.
Mrs. and Mr. Spam start to work around 9am, and Aras will start cleanup around 3pm after the first coffee and email check.
A few days ago I would have said: "Before the next ACE USA, we will not see much improvement in the forum. It´s a thing of politics and priorities".
But even if our comments will not drive a faster improvment of the community area, maybe the current spam problem will. I am somehow "grateful" for the current spam flood, it´s so terrible, Aras just can´t ignore it. I think the Labs team is already highly annoyed. If this continues, I give them one week until they give up and rework the forum.
