Electronic Signatures and Aras Authentication
The Aras Innovator workflow engine has many options and features that enable the modeling of robust business processes in PLM. One of the options available is the capability to authenticate users before they can complete an activity. You may be asking, why would I want to authenticate a user in a workflow? Or, isn’t supplying a username and password when the user starts Innovator sufficient? In many cases, enabling authentication in workflow is not necessary and login authentication is sufficient to monitor workflow activity actions. However, some activities represent approvals or legal acknowledgments and can result in the release of parts (items), BOMs, and documents. Depending on your business and your PLM strategy, these activities may require additional authentication to be in alignment with regulatory compliance requirements for providing electronic signatures. Continue Reading
Just this month (October 2010), Aras announced the release of Service Pack 2 for Innovator 9.2.0. The service pack resolved several issues identified by subscribers, provided some performance enhancements, and addressed some issues related to error handling and messaging. 
In June 2010, Aras announced the release of Service Pack 1 for Innovator 9.2.0. The service pack resolved several issues identified by subscribers, but its primary objective was to introduce the new vault replication functionality. 
As you may know, Aras offers standard Project Management, Quality Planning, and Configuration Management solutions for their Innovator product. What you might not know is that there is also a whole community of other open source solutions and projects that are available to download and add to your Innovator environment. These solutions range from integrations to CATIA, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics to examples of workflow automation. You can find the complete list of solutions by selecting the Projects tab at the top of practically any page on the 
In late April 2010, Aras announced a new open release (9.2) of the Innovator software suite. The new release can be freely downloaded from the 
The majority of businesses these days have a need to manage documents in at least one location other than the “main” site. If the documents have any size to them, the vaulting process can be very painful and time consuming, regardless of the PLM system in use. Luckily, most PLM systems, including Aras Innovator, have the ability to house vaults in multiple locations to support such a multi-site environment. This allows for the vaulting operations to be moved local to the user, saving time and money. 
Aras Innovator has an underlying mark-up language it uses for all of its database transactions. The language is referred to as Aras Mark-up Language, or AML. Aras also provides a sandbox interface for developing and running AML, called NASH. Here’s a short primer for getting familiar with AML and NASH. 
