Aras Technical Documentation, or Tech Docs for short, is Aras Innovator’s state of the art authoring tool to manage, create, and maintain documentation and its contents from images, text, tables, and lists. The Tech Doc framework consists of an intuitive editor allowing users to author product documentation such as catalogs and manuals.

In addition to the generic document elements such as tables and graphics users can embed PLM content directly into the document, mainly other documents and templates compounded to the parent document all with edits tracked in real time. Utilizing component tracking we can even check the version and update our lists accordingly.

Overview:

Lets take a look at some of the functionality within Aras Innovator’s Technical Documentation. We can use the example of a demo Makerbot Part to understand the structure of the Tech Docs framework. The whole documentation is a structured document, on the left-hand side we can view an interactive tree containing all the elements and their order incrementally:

On the right hand side we have all the content, users can select any of the elements contained within the tree on the left and view them highlighted on the right side, this includes whole document references, tables, graphics etc:

Right clicking on PLM elements such as other technical documents referenced within the parent document will bring you directly to that item in the database and allow any necessary changes on the selected item.

Within this item we can make edits that will coincide with the edits on our main document keeping the database in sync.

In this same demo example, there is an Extruder component with a component list contained within a table. If we right click in the structure tree on the left, on the component list element we will see there is a version tracking option. Simply clicking on the Restore Version Tracking then Update to Latest, will update our Extruder Part to the latest version available.

Installation:


Setting up Technical Documentation version 12 R1 is pretty simple! You will first need to download the latest Aras Update release. Once that downloads, go ahead and open the application. In the Online section there will be a list of applications we can download and install. For this blog I am going to download Tech Docs 12 R1. Once the package is downloaded locally hit install and you'll be prompted for some information on your instance. 

After filling in the correct information, press install and within a few minutes you should receive a successful result message. You can then log into your instance of Aras Innovator and utilize the new functionality. In order to verify the application is installed all you need to do is open up the TOC and there should be a new section called Technical Documentation. Should look like this: 

Conclusion:

Thanks for tuning in this week with our Technical Documentation overview and installation post. Leave a comment below on how your organization utilizes technical documentation and how Aras fulfills your organization's needs. Make sure to stay tuned for future applications as well as we cover the full suite of products within Aras Innovator!