Empower Your Organization

So today’s topic is Empower Your Organization Connecting Google Workspace to your digital thread. So with that, a warm welcome to my colleagues, Aihoa and Pawel. Aihoa is a product manager here at Aras. And Pawel is our senior director of strategic research. Pawel, do you want to get us started?

Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Brigitte, and thank you to everyone who joined us today. It is my name is Pawel Chądzyński. And today, together with my colleague Aihoa we will be talking about reimagining management of documents and how that relates to the PLM managed digital threads.

So you probably. Wait a minute. This is not I think we doubled click there we go up. So probably you heard about digital transformation. Who hasn’t. As you know digital transformation is impacting everything that we do and how we do. One measure of its success are the massive amounts of resulting digital assets of every kind and type that are produced every day.

Unfortunately, many of these assets remain disconnected and untraceable. They kind of exist in their own silos. That’s because they are digitized, but not digitalized. And this means that they have no context. It’s like, you know, navigating hyperlinks or URLs between these assets. After a while, one has no idea why or how one got to a particular place, just like navigating internet.

So digitization, digitization without digitalization is the reason why digital transformation struggles in realizing the full potential. And that’s very important because organizations have invested such a massive amounts of money in digital transformation. Now, fun fact in many languages, there is only one word for digitization and digitalization, so be mindful of the of this detail when explaining the need for digitization to your non-English speaking colleagues.

I’ve learned that somebody pointed that out to me when discussing these things, which was really interesting. Next. And documents are one such class of assets, which is always digitized but very often not digitalized. In fact, it’s rarely digitalized, which creates many challenges. For example, how many documents are stored somewhere that makes sense to you, but to nobody else, or how often documents the document.

Versions are tracked by suffixes to the document names. How often do you share documents as attachments to emails or teams? Messages that have comments regarding these documents inside the message and not within the document? How do you maintain relationships between the documents themselves, or between documents and some other digital artifacts like process steps, product parts, requirements? Basically, the entire digital thread.

How do you track who has access to them and how that access was created or granted, you get the point. Digital documents are so often left without a context, without traceability in digital thread, and without a formal process for managing all that. These are all very significant challenges for any organization. So I’m sure that you guys have discussed you have discussed that amongst yourselves.

So that brings us to the specific document management connectors for the Aras digital platform. Aras has introduced several such connectors over the years in the past, including Microsoft Office, office 365 and SharePoint. Today, we are really, truly excited to introduce the next member of the family Aras connector for the Google Workspace. There are many benefits, including functional to the implementation, including functional parity between on premise Aras Innovator deployment and SaaS deployment of Aras Innovator.

Full parity of functionality. There is automatic synchronization across PLM and editing tools and many other such features. Now, instead of just, you know, reading the slide and explaining in detail exactly what each of these relatives mean. I will ask Aihoa to continue with detailed presentation of the connector itself. If you have any questions that will be a session at the end.

Will be glad to answer them. Aihoa

Yeah. Thank you for that, Pawel. Let me go ahead and share my screen. One second. I’ll switch over.

Okay. So I think you should see my screen now. Just let me know if you don’t. So. Hi, everyone. My name is Aihoa Borowicz. I am the product manager for the Aras Workspace Productivity Connector. And I’ll just jump right into it. Starting with the motivation behind the workspace productivity connector. So why workspace productivity connector? Over the past few years, we’ve seen a shift in how teams work with documents.

We’re finding that many organizations, especially globally distributed ones, are relying more on Google Workspace suite. So Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides in order to collaborate and manage their documents. For some customers, docs, sheets and slides have become the default authoring tools, even when Aras Innovator is system of record. But for those documents, they often live outside of Aras Innovator, which creates the downstream problems.

So without a connection to Aras Innovator, those workflows remain fragmented. This leads to version chaos, poor traceability and lost productivity. So this is where the workspace productivity connector comes in. The Workspace Productivity connector addresses these issues by integrating Google Workspace into the Aras digital thread.

So just to give an overview. The Workspace Productivity connector integrates Google Workspace directly with Aras Innovator. So teams can collaborate on documents without having to leave the system. It supports the core Google Workspace applications. These would be Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. This gives users flexibility to work in an environment that they’re already familiar with, and then all edits, versions, and changes are tracked in Aras.

So this helps to maintain full traceability and compliance. And because it’s 100% browser based, there’s no need for a desktop client. Users can access and manage their documents directly from Aras Innovator. The connector also includes a streamlined tasking. This makes it easy and intuitive to open, edit, and save documents directly from Innovator. And finally, Workspace productivity connector is fully source ready.

It provides a modern authoring experience that aligns with current day modern cloud workflows.

So with that, I will go through some of the common use cases. I’ll walk through the scenarios using Workspace Productivity Connector that kind of highlight how users, how exactly they will interact with Aras Innovator and Google Workspace together. So for these I’ll focus on creating a new Aras document, opening and editing an existing one, and linking documents to other items inside of innovative such as part.

So these are kind of the workflows that make up the bulk of the day to day document activities. So they’re a good way to kind of introduce and showcase the functionality of the connector. So let’s get started. So the first use case is creating a new Aras document. And so as you can see here we are starting directly inside of Google Workspace.

In this case this is Google Docs. So instead of downloading a file or working locally, the user can simply choose to create that new Aras document within Google Workspace within the connector itself. So here the user provides a name and content for the new Aras document.

And then the Aras Workspace Productivity connector is an extension that can be open from the right sidebar that will open up the workspace productivity connector task pain. And that is going to show us all the available commands. So from here the user can select create new Aras document. The new Aras document task pain will appear and the user can select the document type.

So what’s shown here are the default document types provided by the connector. But of course an admin can go in and they can customize and configure these document types as necessary in order to meet any specific business requirements. So from there the user can select the document type. They can provide any, the any necessary titles, necessary properties as necessary in order to proceed with the creation.

So notice here there aren’t any client installs. There’s no need to download a file to the desktop. No jumping between systems. What you’re going to see is a fully controlled document that is saved and connected to Aras Innovator.

Oh, that jumped ahead. Sorry.

And so once that document is saved, once the user at the content is saved, that document is automatically stored back into Aras innovator. So you can see all of the properties are stored. The file is there. So this eliminates that cycle of download edit rename upload. So as soon as that save completes, that document has the proper versioning, the permissions and the metadata and innovator right from the start.

And of course you can start from a blank file. Or you can apply a template. If your organization uses standard formats for things like specification supported procedures. And this also supports compliance and audit needs because the file never leaves that environment. Everything’s browser based, so it works well in a SaaS or a hybrid environment. So next let’s look at how users work in a sorry, how users will work with a document that’s already existing in innovator.

So here we’re going to open an existing document. So you can see that all of the default fields are there. We can see the document number. We can see the revisions state the name, the type, the authoring tool. And then in the files tab this is where you’ll see. I’m sorry. I’m not sure why I keeps jumping ahead.

Okay. In the files tab. This is where you’ll see the, the file that saved from Google Workspace. In this case, we know that it’s a Google Docs file based off of the authoring tool. So normally, editing a document would mean downloading the file, editing it locally, and saving a new version. And then we uploading that file, which often goes along with name conflicts and dispersions with around file getting back into the system.

So with the workspace productivity connector, I can run that back so that we can see it with the workspace productivity connector. The user just selects open and workspace. And that will open up the document directly in the browser with no extra steps. So from there, let’s say that a user needs to update a section or add input from a colleague.

They can edit collaboratively, and when they’re done, they just need to say back to Aras. And the connector automatically creates the new generation of the document inside of Aras. So the previous generation is retained and it’s traceable in the version history. And that’s all accessible within the connector itself.

Okay. And for the final scenario, I’ll show how the workspace productivity connector keeps documents connected to your product data without having to jump back into Aras Innovator. So in this example, we’re going to start inside of Google Docs. We are going to start with a document that we’d like to be managed by Aras So in order to do that we’ll need to create a new Aras document and link it to an item that’s inside of Aras

Innovator. And again, if the item isn’t already created, that’s fine. You can always create that link later. So from the Workspace Productivity Connector task scene when we create a new Aras document. You’ll see that there’s an option to associate the document with an item, an innovator like a part. And that’s done through the link to field. So here we go.

So instead of navigating through innovator and creating manually attaching that file, the user can go into the workspace Productivity connector. They can search directly for the item that they’d like to link. And once we’ve selected their item we would save productivity. Connector is going to set that item automatically into the linked item field. And then once that’s done the user can go ahead, specify any of the remaining fields such as title or any necessary properties.

And then the document can be saved and the link is on created automatically. So there’s no downloading or uploading or switching tags. So that document and the relationship is going to be saved in existing Aras innovator.

So from there we can view the save document. If we need to, we can see that all of the properties and fields have been set. The file is related to the document. And if we go into that part item type, if we go to the document tab we’ll see that that file has is now showing up under the items relationship just as if it were added from the UI.

And so just like that, just like any other Workspace document, the new document is now fully linked in. Innovator. Users can view the document. They can open it again in Google Docs with full version control and permissions intact. Users can collaborate without switching systems, reducing errors and speeding up workflows. And so this integration is particularly powerful for any controlled documents or project deliverables.

You get that type linkage to the to the digital thread, but without having to force users to leave the authoring environment.

Okay. So with that, let’s quickly talk about what we have planned for the Aras Workspace productivity connector. The first release went live on August 28th. Upcoming releases will deliver UI enhancements and an open item command. So this is going to marry the functionality that is available for our other connectors. And we also plan to investigate adding support for Gmail as well.

That will be similar to the outlook capabilities that we have for the office connectors.

So to summarize, Workspace Productivity Connector enables seamless collaboration in Google Workspace while keeping documents fully traceable inside of Aras Innovator. It’s designed for sass browser native and modern collaboration. And I’d love to hear your thoughts. Any suggestions that you may have? Any questions? Please feel free to send them my way.

Great. Thank you, Pawel and Aihoa both for your presentation and going through all of that, Aihoa. So if anyone has any questions, please feel free now to submit them into the questions panel in the webinar platform, as also as I mentioned. If you have any other questions or suggestions for her, her emails up there as well as cobbles.

So you have both of their contact information. So it looks like we already have a few submitted, so we’ll go ahead and get started. Which versions of of Aras innovator are compatible with the Aras workspace productivity connector.

Yeah a good detail to know. So we support various Aras innovator versions release 43 and higher.

And what release are we on now. Just so people are we on release 36 now? Correct. Perfect. Okay. So. And I was well, when using the Google Workspace integration, our files stored in Google or an Aras.

Yep. So by default when you’re working with the Google files through the Workspace Productivity connector, the PDF version of the file is going to be automatically stored in Aras. So this ensures that a consistent viewable copy is maintained within the Aras document for and long term reference. While that live editable version remains in Google Workspace for that collaboration.

Perfect. Thank you. Pawel, are there any differences in functionality considerations between the SaaS and on premise versions of Aras innovator when using this connector?

Oh, you. Looks like you’re on mute still. You’re answering.

I apologize. So I love that question because I love the answer. There is no difference. In other words, the implementation and architecture of the connector is I provides identical functionality on premise or in in the cloud, including the ability to configure a specific business rules or a specific business logic that you may have. There is no difference. So what I just referred to in terms of, for example, where where the files are kept out of the box is, is a certain way, but you could modify that any way you want, which is a standard feature of of Aras.

And there is no difference between on premise and SaaS deployments.

Great. Thank you. Aihoa, are our document approvals done within within Google Workspace or within

Aras?

It’s a great question. So the life cycles all of that is handled inside of Aras. So Google would be where you do the live collaboration. And then all of the releases the versioning, all of that is handled with an Aras simulator.

Perfect. So kind of going off of that, can you work with multiple users at the same time in the same document? Yeah yeah yeah.

So that’s one of the great benefits of Google Workspace is the ability to collaborate with other users. So it is possible to collaborate on documents inside Google Workspace so that functionality does not change.

Perfect. And is there a difference between the Aras workspace productivity connector and the Aras productivity connector.

So you I, I’m trying to read the question. So maybe I maybe. Pawel, did you have something.

Yeah. I think that what happens is that somehow that question dropped office productivity connector. So there’s a workspace productivity commentator for Google and Office Productivity Connector for Microsoft. That’s differently.

Yeah.

That’s what I was thinking as well. But I wanted to confirm with both of you. And John, if you have more questions, please feel free to submit to free and answer correctly. What kind of licensing models is for the Google Workspace Connector? How to implement that? Is there any partner who can help with that? If you guys don’t know about partner, we can always get back to this user.

But I think a licensing licensing model we talked about. But I wanted to make sure we answered.

Yeah I think we can follow up separately on this. But Google. Yeah.

Perfect.

We just make sure we got all of that. Perfect. Well, it looks like we thank you for all of your questions and if any we didn’t answer or the ones we wanted to follow up on. We will follow up after the webinar.