Edit Control

The Aras Office Productivity Connector provides several features to support editing files in Office applications.

In Aras terminology, when a user Claims an Item like a Document, the user can reserve it so that only that user can edit it. Only one person at a time can claim any given Item. When the user Unclaims the Item, it is available for others to claim and edit. The ability to claim Items is controlled by Aras’s Permissions. For example, Permissions for most users are set so that when an Item is in the Preliminary (in-work) State, it can be claimed, but when it is in the Released State, it cannot be claimed and, therefore, cannot be edited.

The Aras Office Productivity Connector leverages the Claim and Unclaim functions to control who has the right to edit files. The Claim Status is indicated by the Claimed by field in the task pane. If this shows a name, then the Document is claimed, and if not, it is unclaimed. If it is showing a user’s name, that user has edit rights.

The Aras Office Productivity Connector automates much of the Claim and Unclaim behavior in intuitive ways when working on Office files.

Use Done when finished editing, and Aras will take care of proper Claiming and Unclaiming.

When a user clicks on Open, the user opens the latest version saved in Aras. However, since the old versions are still managed in Aras, it is possible to open the old versions as well. This is done by selecting Open and using the Download Versions Command after opening a file using Open. Clicking Download Versions will open the task pane showing all versions to select from:

Within MS Word only, the Download Versions task pane enables easy comparison of two versions of the same file.

In addition to the ability to control versioning with the Aras Office Productivity Connector, Aras provides full enterprise change process capabilities for Documents. This process enables creating revisions of Documents, driven by an approval workflow where the Documents progress through a set of Life Cycle States. This process is typically driven by an Aras Change Item such as an ECO (Engineering Change Order) or DCO (Document Change Order). This is an extensive topic and can involve many site-specific customizations at a company. This document will only introduce the topic and explain how the Aras Office Productivity Connector interacts with the change process. For further details, please refer to Aras’s general documentation.

The following diagram illustrates an example of a Document moving through two successive revisions: being created, updated, and released to Revision A and then modified again and released to Revision B. The grey boxes marked Preliminary, In Review, and Released indicate the document’s Life Cycle States.

The highlights of the diagram are:

• The edit cycles described in the diagram in the next section, Lifecycle State Promotion, are also shown here. They take place during the Preliminary Life Cycle State.
• Permission to modify Documents is based on the Life Cycle State. In Preliminary State (which means In Work), permissions are set such that users responsible for creating Documents have edit rights. In states In Review and Released, these users will not have edit rights because the Document should not be changed while it is in review or released.
• Activities within the Workflow change the Document’s Life Cycle State. For example, the Document moves from Preliminary to In Review when the responsible user announces the editing is complete.
• Versions (also known as Generations in the Aras web client) always increase by one on each edit cycle across all revisions. In the example above, Version 2 is released as Revision A, and Version 5 is released as Revision B.
• Any number of new Versions can be created within one Revision. Only the last one will be released, but the others are kept in the system and can be retrieved later.
• The new “to be” Revision is assigned to the Document as soon as it moves to Preliminary State.
• During the In Review State, the responsible parties review the document contents. If they approve, the Document will be moved to the Released State. If they do not approve, the Workflow can loop back so that the Document goes back to the Preliminary State for further editing. This is not shown in the diagram.
• Revision Sequences (A, B, C, etc.), Life Cycle State Names, and Workflow Activities are all configurable in Aras Innovator to fit company processes. The example shown is based on the software’s out-of-the-box behavior.

Another approach to managing the Document change process is to use manual Lifecycle State Promotion, in which case there is no ECO or DCO as described in the previous section. Still, users can simply promote from one state to another manually. For example, here is a simple Document Lifecycle Map showing three States that the Document can have:

If Documents are defined in this manner, then an administrator can set up the Aras Office Productivity Connector so that the Promote command can be accessed directly from the Office ribbon. By clicking on this command, the current Document can be promoted to a desired state. Note that the Document must be unclaimed to promote.