Anark 4.5.88 Release Announcement

September 27, 2024 - Anark announces that Release 4.5.88 of the Product Innovation Platform  for manufacturers is now available and includes new features, enhancements, and updates based on customer feedback and industry demand.  Releases occur every 5-6 weeks and can be immediately applied to SaaS, on-prem and desktop installations. Anark's agile release process delivers continuous value improvement to their customers and additional information can be found in release documentation.

Register for the Fall 2024 Live Product Update and Roadmap session with Brian Dye, Anark’s Director of Product on Tuesday October 29th at 1PM EDT where Anark will talk about Release 88 and much more.

Anark Release 4.5.88

Anark Collaborate Enhancements

New Work Item capabilities

The ability to manage manufacturing and design workflows with flexible capabilities that map to your processes has always been a critical aspect if the Anark Product Innovation Platform.  In  Release 88, the multiple ways to create, track and resolve Work Items has been significantly expanded.  Traditional task tracking tools have always been isolated from Engineering and Manufacturing workflows and with this new Work Item functionality, primes, suppliers, customers and partners can more readily stay on task across role and organizational boundaries. 

Release 88 provides capabilities for planning, dispositioning, tracking, and logging every work item, approval, request, waiver, and more side by side with engineering product data, using the continually enhanced  Anark Technical Data Packages (TDP) content items.  Any type of viewable content within an Anark Collaborate content item can be marked up and tied to Work Items to clarify, track, resolve and archive technical and business decisions. 

Figure 1 - Visual Technical Data that can be explicitly tied to Work Items

Building upon the concepts of comments and markups within Anark Collaborate, Work Items can be managed within Activity based Conversations. There are three main avenues for creating a new work item ranging from directly creating one in the standard navigation bar, using the Work Items tab within an Activity, or through a comment on a conversation in an Activity.

Figure 2 - Conversations with Work Items as a part of collaborative Activities

Any of these Work Item creation options will result in a mode where users can provide the Work Item title, description, assignee, due date, state, priority, and activity association.  Creating a Work item is as simple as navigating to an activity, creating a conversation if necessary,  select `Comment` to create a `Work Item` and choose from `Task`, `Issue`, or `Review` as the Work Item type.

From the Work Item page, the work item author, assignee and any admin can update the properties of the work item, e.g. they can change and save the work item from `Proposed` to `In Progress`, upgrade the priority from `Medium` to `High`, etc. and this will also update the work item’s history. These users can also add content items and files to the work item. Members of the activity associated with the work item can leave comments and replies.

To view the history of changes made to a work item, select the `History` tab in the upper right corner of the work item page. The history page contains a log of each batch of changes made to the work item. The first entry in a work item’s history will always contain the properties set upon initial creation.

Figure 3 - Work Item Tracking and History within Anark Collaborate

Anark is excited about  Work Item capabilities which is a result of many conversations with customers on how they prefer to work with technical data, to become more innovative and productive.  For more details on Anark's Product Innovation Platform - Work Management, please see the Anark Product Page.

Markup Enhancements for PDF and Data Component Content Types

New markup enhancements in Release 88 expand the existing markup capabilities for both PDF and Data Component content types at this time. This allows for multiple users to markup content within a single view and provide quick visibility to who made a markup and when. 

These new capabilities extend the previous existing markup tools, and for PDF and Data Components types, provides a markup indicator that is expandable. In this mode, users can type comments related to the markup created. When users later view a markup, they are able to see each one independently and understand the author and date of creation.  Anark plans to support 3D Content types and images with similar functionality in a near term release.

Figure 4 - Markup Enhancements for PDF and Data Component content items

Anark Publish Enhancements

PLM Integrations Enhancements:

Several enhancements have been made to Anark Publish and specifically, the PLM integrations for Windchill and Teamcenter in Release 4.5.88.  Capabilities include:

Teamcenter Integration:

• Added reference integration support for Teamcenter version 2312. Both item revision publishing and package publishing can be performed in Teamcenter 2312.
• Enhanced envelope-based email functionality with configurable attachment of log files to the envelope object and capability to share email with multiple users.
• Enhanced reference integration to store attachment files in a separate file instead of listing them in the command line arguments. This change eliminates restrictions on number files that can be processed via command line.
• Improved exception handling during publishing.

Windchill  Integration:

• Enhanced support for configuring Windchill and Anark Publish in secured mode with SSL certificate-based validation. This ensures publishing data from PLM systems remains secure at rest and in-transit.

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• Role Based Access Controls (RBAC)
• Lo-Code Template Introduction
• Measurement

For more information in this or any previous releases Contact us

Current customers can use our Support Portal

Register for the Fall 2024 Live Product Update and Roadmap session with Brian Dye, Anark’s Director of Product on Tuesday October 29nd at 1PM EDT.