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,
I absolutely share your opinion that there should be also more general discussion in the Forum and not just technical requests. Also I cannot provide you any helpful feedback into this topic here. But I am happy to see that also other users are interested in these kind of discussions.
As far as I have heard, Aras plans to improve the forum to make it easier to bring the right people together to solve or at least discuss specific ideas. That´s right now really difficult, as the forum sections doesn´t really represent the content (despite the developers-area perhaps). Quite all sections are often misused for even more developer questions, so interested topics are definitely there, but often hard to find for other interested users.
Angela
Hello Angela
So there are already two of us. Hopefully Aras people manage to see our replies with all the forum seemingly being immersed with asian lettered topics.
Hopefully Aras does not only plan to improve the forum but will soon do so.
I attended the ACE 2018 Europe. There they again cited Peter Schroers famous words "Go faster". Yet this Phrase alone won't do the job :-(
I have no idea if the forums are moderated, but if so, to moderator should just move technical topics to the developer forum...
So people looking for general ideas/discussion (Like you and I, and hopefully more) might find it easier to exchange.
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.
Hello Angela
I also thought this forum was monitored. But after the spam flood I was a bit desparate as I hadn't any mailaddress to where I could report this. So I wrote to [email protected] this morning (10:10). I got an answer 22 minutes later and on 14:50 I received a mail that the spam post have been deleted.
Interestingly the answer was from German personel not from the US. Because then I had expected a timeframe of weeks (as you already suggested).
So, lets hope that "Go faster" is slowly getting not only a phrase of Peter but an attitude of the Aras Company/community/etc. itself.
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
Hi Eli
Great! Thank you for the update on the ongoing tasks regarding the community platform. I really appreaciate this!
Also I am reliefed to hear that there are more people than just two looking for non-code topics and general PLM questions. I have been on the ACE Europe as well and talking with Aras users in the coffee breaks or on the evening event I got a similar impression.
Basically this is why I started posting my topic in the first place.
Because I thought being unsatisfied and lamenting around on one's own doesn't help. It needs the communication and feedback so that things can be changed and improved. And this dicussion proved that it can happen and work within a few days. It only needs a first step. Hopefully it is not just a flash in the pan.
With regards to the original topic, we had a discussion as well. We believe there will never be an "either/or" but a "both/and". Not all team/product based discussion needs to be "tracked" via Visual Collaboration in PLM/Aras, nor is every document created in MS Teams really product relevant.
So once a project comes to the finish line, someone has to decide, with information of MS Teams need to go to PLM. And this import should than be as easy as possible. Or maybe a import is not necessary but some kind of relation or link that a user can "connect" both worlds by a mouse click.
Because let's be honest: no one has the time nor the knowledge to decide what information will be important in the future and what not after a project is finished! So "all in" is probably the approach that will be used by the most. We need just to take a look at our private photo databases...;-)
