Experience the Power of Community at the ACE 2025 Tech Summit
It’s that time of year again! Our annual Aras Community Event (ACE) is right around the corner. This year the event is taking place near Aras’ hometown of Boston from March 31 to April 3. This year’s ACE is special as it marks the 25th anniversary of Aras as a company. The event is shaping up to be one of our best yet, with tons of great presentations and breakout sessions for everyone. Like most who have attended it, the Tech Summit is my favorite part of the event. It will be on Monday, March 31. In previous years, it was invite-only. This year, we're opening it up to the entire community, welcoming anyone who wants to participate. We hope to bring in some new technical voices who might not have participated in the past. Email Beth Ewing after completing your ACE registration to register for the Tech Summit. The session lasts most of the day and allows the Aras Innovator® tech community to get together and discuss all things Innovator. In the past, we’ve covered everything from new features to best practices, and even explored ways to enhance the product based on feedback from users like you. The Tech Summit provides a space to hear how our partners and customers are using Aras Innovator. This year we’ll have presentations from customers and partners, in which they will share some of the interesting modifications they’ve made to our platform. Community presenters will: Show capabilities they built in Aras Innovator and discuss how they did it (ex: Impact Matrix extensions, pervasive search) Demo the tools they use to manage their Aras Innovator development projects Share how the next generation of engineers are building PLM skills and knowledge with Aras Between Aras presentations, customer showcases, and open discussion, the Tech Summit is a favorite part of the ACE experience. (It certainly was my favorite part of last year’s event!) The summit will be followed by a welcome reception, and the following days are filled with interesting sessions to attend. If any of the above topics are interesting to you or someone you know who is attending ACE, register now to save your place! Here's a quick breakdown of the Tech-Summit agenda: Welcome & Introductions - get to know the attendees and presenters Community Demos - community members show off what they've built and share their knowledge AI Spotlight - AI demos and insights from Aras Lab Lunch Community Update - what's new and what's coming Open Forum Discussions - bring your questions and ideas! This session is all about connecting with your fellow Builders and learning from the group's collective experience. I’m looking forward to ACE this year and to meeting some of you there. Please feel free to reach out if you have questions regarding this year’s Tech Summit or want to get involved. To secure your spot for the Tech Summit, email Beth Ewing after completing your ACE registration. Registration is open right up to the event, but I’d recommend locking in your registration and hotel as soon as possible!A Few Tips for Styling Responsive Forms with Aras Innovator
In previous posts, we’ve covered the basics of responsive forms. In this blog, we will dive even deeper and share some tips and tricks for making responsive forms more visually appealing to your end users. Here are a few tips on how to make your responsive forms convey more information in the same space. Nested columns In our first introductory blog on responsive forms, we outlined how your form can be broken down into columns to better organize your properties. A cool thing that you might not know is that you can actually break your columns into additional columns. While that might sound complicated, our UI makes it very simple to configure. Here’s a quick look at what this looks like in action: To configure this, you need to open your responsive form editor and just drag a box from the Structure tab into one of your columns: From here, you can select any of your unused properties and drop them directly into the new columns you’ve created. It’s important to keep in mind the length of your property when doing this and reserve this practice for shorter properties. Good examples are things like Revision, State, Generation, Part Number, and things like Booleans or Cost. Color coding important properties In another of my previous blogs, I showed how you can set rules to customize your forms. These can be based on things like who is viewing the form or what the actual value of the property is. This can be used in multiple different ways, but one that I’ve found useful is to check the current variable of your item and style the Revision property a different color if you’re not looking at the most current version of the Item. This gives your user a very quick visual indication that they might be looking at an older version of an Item. Here’s a quick look at what that rule would look like: Another great place to use this is on lifecycle/workflow states. Using a simple color code allows users to quickly understand what is happening with their Items once they open a form. I recommend playing around with these to see what is possible. In the same vein, utilizing rules to hide specific properties from identities is much easier than it was in the old form system. This allows you to have fewer specialized views, which require less maintenance. Concluding thoughts Responsive forms continue to receive enhancements with each release. There has never been a better time to give them a try, and trying is as simple as pressing this button on your Item’s form: Keep in mind that this button just changes your view and doesn’t overwrite any of your existing forms. You can freely switch back and forth between your classic and responsive forms. Give them a try, and let us know what you’re able to build! Consider sharing with colleagues via comments. We want to hear from you.
