MS Teams vs. Secure Social? Parallel universes?

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  
Parents
  • Hi Angela and ohuber01, I completely sympathize with your frustrations regarding the increased spam activity in the forums. As one of the people who wakes up to 50+ junk forum notifications every morning, I assure you that we are aware of the problem and we try to clean it up as quickly as possible. :) Our internal services team is finishing up some final tasks for our community platform migration. Once the migration is complete (hopefully any day now), the daily volume of spam should be minimal. Regarding features to facilitate conversation about non-code topics and community projects - we will be addressing this further after the community platform migration is complete. I heard a lot of feedback about this at ACE Europe, so you two are not the only ones interested in these features. And regarding MS Teams, the original conversation topic - We use MS Teams and Office 365 internally at Aras, so we definitely have interest in integrations and connectors, both on a product level and community level. I have a few use cases documented that I'd like to address via community projects once OAuth is production-ready. In the meantime, if you have user stories or ideas of how you would like to see MS Teams/Office 365 work with Innovator/Visual Collaboration (aka secure social), please feel free to share them here. I'll send the thread to our Office Connector/Integration PM to review. I'm sure she'd love to hear your user stories. Eli
    Eli Donahue Aras Labs Lead Engineer
Reply
  • Hi Angela and ohuber01, I completely sympathize with your frustrations regarding the increased spam activity in the forums. As one of the people who wakes up to 50+ junk forum notifications every morning, I assure you that we are aware of the problem and we try to clean it up as quickly as possible. :) Our internal services team is finishing up some final tasks for our community platform migration. Once the migration is complete (hopefully any day now), the daily volume of spam should be minimal. Regarding features to facilitate conversation about non-code topics and community projects - we will be addressing this further after the community platform migration is complete. I heard a lot of feedback about this at ACE Europe, so you two are not the only ones interested in these features. And regarding MS Teams, the original conversation topic - We use MS Teams and Office 365 internally at Aras, so we definitely have interest in integrations and connectors, both on a product level and community level. I have a few use cases documented that I'd like to address via community projects once OAuth is production-ready. In the meantime, if you have user stories or ideas of how you would like to see MS Teams/Office 365 work with Innovator/Visual Collaboration (aka secure social), please feel free to share them here. I'll send the thread to our Office Connector/Integration PM to review. I'm sure she'd love to hear your user stories. Eli
    Eli Donahue Aras Labs Lead Engineer
Children
No Data