Reach Greater Returns with What’s New in Teamcenter

Now’s the time to upgrade! Take advantage of what’s new in Teamcenter 11.4 and Active Workspace 3.4 to help you reduce your cost of ownership and improve the value of your product lifecycle management (PLM) investment. See how you can reach more people and processes, and reach higher levels of efficiency!

Reach more people

Take a closer look at Active Workspace, which makes it easy for people in different locations and functional areas of your business to use Teamcenter from a web browser, on any device, and within familiar design and office applications.

With this release, Microsoft Office users can directly view and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files within the web browser, without a plug-in or any download. Users of Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop can revise, open, edit and save illustrations in Active Workspace.

Active Workspace 3.4 makes it easier to accomplish tasks and understand data faster and with fewer clicks due to improved “flattening” of the user interface (UI). Now you can configure role- or task-based workspaces to include only relevant content such as stylesheet content, pages/tabs and pertinent properties in the columns of tables.

You will also see visualization improvements in Active Workspace including new client side rendering that does not require a server-side graphics card. Once a part is selected, the part is displayed in the preview window, where the user can zoom in/out and rotate the part.

For advanced PLM visualization users, Active Workspace can be hosted within a running session of Teamcenter Visualization. Multiple selections made in the Teamcenter Visualization 3D view are reflected in the hosted session of Active Workspace.

The new Teamcenter Visualization VR virtual reality (VR) add-on module supports mainstream VR devices such as the HTC Vive™, Oculus Rift™ and the zSpace® device. It enables users to perform form, fit and function studies, as well as conduct design reviews by immersing themselves in the virtual world of the product’s digital twin.

Reach across business processes

If you use BOM and configuration management, you can see how it’s even easier to navigate product structure with the newly available tree format to expand and collapse structure branches. Table view has improved performance through efficient virtualization of the content. The productivity enhancements for trees work in conjunction with the existing table capabilities for edit, fill down, sort, drag & drop, many data types like LOVs, date pickers, etc.

Active Workspace 3.4 enables Smart Discovery, so you can find the correct set of content to do your work – across product variants, across multiple product organizations, using advanced context-specific search. You can specify a variant configuration in Active Workspace (available only with the new Product Configurator).

With guided configuration mode, you can see and select only valid features for a buildable, orderable variant. You can view separate engineering and CAD BOMs presented in a single view. You can also locate BOM content by searching using a combination of data from engineering and CAD BOMs. You can save the aligned Engineering and CAD BOMs along with your search criteria to create a BOM based working context. This context can be retrieved and shared with other users.

Integrated requirements management usability takes a major step forward with Active Workspace 3.4. You will see improvements in Microsoft Word document and Excel spreadsheet import, tree navigation of requirement specifications, direct editing in Word, improved html-rich text editing including features like embedded equations, and easier tracelink creation. The “Open in Office Client’ feature provides complete access to Microsoft Office features.

Teamcenter 11.4 continues to simplify the process of capturing supplier data to support holistic environmental compliance grading by offering a highly automated Teamcenter BOMcheck integration. The integration with the BOMcheck supplier declaration database helps compliance officers more easily gather supplier disclosure data for RoHS, REACH, and other substance declarations.

Reach greater returns

In addition to Teamcenter 11.4’s enhancements to portfolio applications, now you more easily create unique PLM applications that suit your business. Our comprehensive support for a declarative UI framework simplifies how your IT team can deliver an adaptive PLM environment tailored to your unique business processes through declarative configuration of re-usable components, instead of writing custom software code. With this release, you can more easily collaborate with other Teamcenter customers using the industry preferred tool, GitHub, to find and reuse extension examples. We also provide a mature UI pattern library showcase that you can reference for new declarative UI elements added in Active Workspace 3.4.

This release also includes enhancements to the Teamcenter Integration Framework. You can run multiple instances for improved load balancing and failover capabilities. This ensures that there is no single point of failure and allows the integrations and business processes dependent on the integration to run in high availability mode. You have the option of saving the current state of the server, including the state of running jobs and queued jobs to be saved if there is a requirement to shut down the server and bring it up with the saved state restored.

As you grow your PLM deployment, Teamcenter 11.4 and Active Workspace 3.4 delivers enhanced applications throughout the portfolio to help you improve productivity and efficiency. Read the fact sheet for all the details.

To catch up on highlights of earlier releases, read the fact sheets for 11.3, 11.2.3, 11.2.2, 10.1.7, 10.1.6, and 10.1.5!

Rohit Tangri is the Vice President of Teamcenter Product Management, Marketing and Business Development for Siemens PLM Software.