Aras just announced an open source PLM solution for SharePoint, so I caught up with Peter Schroer (our CEO) to find out more about it, how it works and who should be excited about it.  Here’s what Peter had to say… Jen:  What e...

A discussion on Oleg’s blog Beyond PLM made me think about the motivations and incentives of open source as an approach for developing software and how it fits with associated business models. The post was titled “PLM and Open Source Lice…

You may have seen the recent user blog post about the ease of customization on Aras.  That prompted me to start digging out the rapid fire videos from a variety of presenters about ways in which the solution has been extended including various projec

Recently, Graham McCall at AESSiS wrote a pretty good blog post titled “Why Some People Don’t Like PLM”. It’s a good re-post here and figured I’d include my own 2 cents as well. First, here’s Graham’s perspective: I thought it might be a good idea to…

“Obfuscation” is the term for scrambling of the data and/or table names, property names within the PLM database. This is the way the other major PLM / PDM systems were / are designed. The database table for the Part Master is not called /...

On one hand, we're getting promising news about the growth in manufacturing in the US and Asia (but with Europe a little less confident).  On the other hand, the words "double-dip recession" are in the business press every day. Gartner is recommendi

Feedback we’ve gotten ‘loud & clear’ at previous community events was that people want a way to see the Community Solutions in action. So, this year at ACE 2010 we tried something new. Peter got the idea from this year’s C…

Saw a Discussion on LinkedIn "PLM" group titled "Disconnect between OOTB PLM Functionalities and Customer requirements". The post said: Many of the PLM solutions have came up from big customers who had developed the sysytem for their own…

Download >>> ZIP of ALL SLIDES This year's international Aras Community Event (ACE) took place on May 10-11, 2010 and was hosted by Motorola at their worldwide headquarters in Schaumburg, IL. We really appreciate Motorola's generosity and h…

I’ve spent the last two days completely immersed in the Aras Community.  Of course, I work for Aras so one might think this isn’t much of a deviation from the norm – but it is.  As the Director of the Aras Community I do s...

A few days back, Oleg over at Daily PLM Think Tank did another good post titled PLM, Cloud, SaaS and Software Upgrades. It looks at several different software delivery trends (i.e. on-premise vs in-cloud) to really get at what I consider a major issu…

Wanted to share this article from Fortune Magazine / CNN Money website called 'Big Software has duped us for decades'. Roger Burkhardt does a pretty good job of describing how enterprise software licensing actually works... I've included some excerpt…

Was reading Managing Automation’s blog The Edge by Jeff Moad and he poses the question, “Where Did All the Big Software Deals Go?” Jeff says: …lingering reluctance on the part of manufacturers to commit to significant technol...

This month’s Desktop Engineering has an editorial by Peter Schroer, Aras President and Founder, about the impact of the recession on product development and engineering at global corporations. The implications range from the need for new products th…

Where is enterprise PLM software headed from a technology architecture stand-point? And even more broadly, where is enterprise software headed in general? If you are an enterprise architect or have broad responsibility for corporate IT enterprise ap…

Change management processes are difficult enough to master, however, when you introduce change notification across the supply chain there is another order of magnitude in the challenge. Most company’s focus on getting review and approval automa...

The way enterprise PLM software is licensed to businesses is wrong, end of story. Pay now. Pay later. Pay extra. Pay more. Traditional PLM licensing schemes are complicated, confusing, expensive, and broken… and their days are numbered. To und...

Everyone wants it their way… and that’s a good thing. Choice. That’s what ensures we have cloths that fit, styles we like, food we enjoy, and (in the business software world) systems that work for our specific industry practices an...

The latest Aras PLM software release download is now available on the web site. This major release incorporates dozens of corporate community contributions constituting hundreds of innovative features and enhancements including: ECO / MCO simple eng…

A few days ago Jim Brown at Tech-Clarity had posted on “the impact of the economy on the engineering software industry?”… This topic is a bit different than the implications for end user customer companies. The emphasis is on the engineering software…

Have been having discussions about Lean Product Development in various groups on LinkedIn (PDMA, PLM Group, etc). One of the important implications that has surprisingly not come up in the discussions is how different product development technologies…

Over the past couple months Jeff Cope at Extensible CAD Technologies has been doing a detailed product review of the Aras PLM software solution suite for the CAD community site ConnectPress. This is a pretty good overview of the solution functionalit…

Just read today’s CIMdata newsletter which includes a poll on the impact of the global recession on PLM initiatives. The results and analysis highlight some pertinent information. CIMdata explains the data and goes on to conclude that: …just over …

In December the Aras Community Network had two events in Taiwan organized by Broadway Consulting Services and sponsored by National Formosa University, Cardinal Tien College, and Microsoft. The sessions were conducted in Taipei and Taichung. Over 80 …

Download >>> PLM SLIDES The Aras community has really grown internationally over the past year and on October 17th we held the first European community event to get people together, collaborate, and share. Once again Microsoft stepped up an