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www.ADandP.media AD&P; ∕ AUGUST 2017 PLM information technology (IT) departments have nice things to say about it too because Active Workspace has a zero-in- stall footprint, requires no additional plug-ins, and, where applicable, its touch-enabled interface operates the same and seamlessly on any modern compute device. Active Workspace can also be embedded within familiar third-party applications such as Teamcenter Rich Application Client, Siemens PLM NX and Microsoft Office. Active Workspace got a new look last year, such as new styling and icons to help distinguish content from commands. Add to that consistent drag-and-drop support and giving users the ability to work across multiple browser windows and tabs. Users can now scroll through attach- ments "like they were looking through a photo album," says Bohman. Advanced capabilities let users easily view images, JT, text, PDF and markups, and then extract that content for other purposes in Teamcenter and in external software programs. Add to this smart columns that display fields based on folder contents, command overflow presented better in small mobile devices, and more editing capabilities in various display modes. Users can now easily identify objects that have a release status and quickly see that status. The simple addition of breadcrumb navigation improves multi-selection capabilities and visualizing data. Bringing together data from multiple objects into a single view reduces the back-and-forth needed between chunks of data in order to understand that information. Last, the latest version of Active Workspace includes a Gantt-chart interface to directly update and manipulate schedules and dependencies, as well as to show or hide critical-path analysis, which the system can calculate across the master schedule and sub-schedules. Users can insert subschedules into high-level schedules and then, still within the web-based Active Workspace interface, create dependencies between those schedules. Users can change The product configurator in Teamcenter handles product configurations as independent lifecycles—with a single, reusable definition of the variability. acquisitions of Polarion (in late 2015; specialty: application lifecycle management, ALM) and Mentor Graphics (in March; specialty: electronic design automation, EDA) strengthen Teamcenter's delivery of an "unambiguous definition" of a product. (Think RFLP: requirements, functional, logical, physical.) Explains Rohit Tangri, vice president of Teamcenter Product Management, Marketing and Business Development, "Polarion ALM and Teamcenter items are automatically mapped across requirements and change management workflows for better bi-directional traceability. Because hardware and software teams are more productive when working in their native environments, users will be able to initiate change and requirement engineering workflows in either Teamcenter or Polarion." These and other Siemens PLM acquisitions are being folded into a federated data model: Different information resides in multiple systems, yet all the systems work as one without the need to replicate data. (That "one," of course, is Teamcenter.) A significant benefit of this "is traceability across all platforms and visibility to everybody," says Bohman. Why is this important nowadays? Automakers are designing "world" cars that have a possible market of 60 to 70 countries, points out Martin O'Brien, vice president and general manager, Integrated Electric Systems Division, Mentor Graphics Corp. "Combine the options of the variances together, you literally have billions of electrical configurations that are possible." Too many cars can experi- ence warranty problems not in the mechanical systems, but in the matchup of software with the mechanical systems. Shipping a car with wrong or outdated software leads to problems in product quality as well as serious liability problems. Hence the impetus for robust systems to manage product designs across their mechanical, electronic and software domains—throughout the lifecycle of the product. The traditional approach for handling product variability was to manage each of the different variations. That's fine, up to a point. The management effort increases dramatically as the number of variations (i.e., car options) increases. Now, the product configurator in Teamcenter handles product configurations as independent lifecycles—with a single, reusable definition of the variability. This approach enables a more flexible and intuitive rules-based approach for product variability control and analysis. REACH OUT TO USERS Active Workspace "literally puts PLM at your fingertips," according to Siemens PLM; it's a "universal viewer" embedded throughout Teamcenter, says Bohman; and 49