Find What You Need Faster with Active Workspace 3.0

Active Workspace 3.0 introduces search enhancements that improve your ability to find what you need faster. The driving factors behind these enhancements are one, the feedback from our customers, and two, our quest to make your search experience simple, but powerful. Following up on Samir’s earlier blog post in this series, you will learn more about how Search enhancements in Active Workspace 3.0 can help you find what you need faster and increase your productivity.

Column Configuration (Arrange Columns)

When you perform a search and view the search results in a “table view”, Active Workspace populates the columns of the table with properties of the search results. With Active Workspace 3.0 you will now have the ability to control what columns will be displayed in the search results table. You can perform simple actions such as hide/unhide columns and re-order the columns. Active Workspace will remember your last saved column configuration. As you perform a new search, Active Workspace has the capability to preserve column configurations from a previously saved configuration plus bring in any additional properties based on the new search results.

• Right-click (or touch and hold) on the search table header to launch the Arrange Panel
• Reorder, hide/unhide or adjust column widths using the Arrange Panel
• List of properties available to be displayed on columns per each Object Type is provided through an XML import by the system admin
• By default, Active Workspace will display common properties across all types of objects in the search results
• You can make changes to the column configuration and Active Workspace will remember your last column configuration

Table Properties

Until Teamcenter 10.1.5 all the properties in Teamcenter (or almost all enterprise applications for that matter) had “linear, one-dimensional” properties such as Strings, Dates, List of Values, etc. However, there was no configurable way to define a two-dimensional property such as a table (or a matrix). Not only can such a table property be created in Teamcenter, but you can perform a search and filter data based on the rows and columns of the table property. Active Workspace search has the capability to provide appropriate search results that match values (rows) of two or more properties (columns).

Say, a table property on an object Type is defined in the data model and is called “Size”. Size has three member properties called Length, Width, and Height.

Please refer to the example representation below (e.g. Size Table Property – UI representation)

Table Property names and values are now provided as filters for search results.

With Active Workspace you can filter out any inconsequential values for other member properties once a selection is made on a member property.

For example, if Size Length = 12 is selected as a filter, then all the values from Size Width and Size Height for which there are no matching rows in the table for any data element will be removed from the filter (this helps to prevent you from picking the wrong combination of filters in a table property)

In-context Search – Filter/Facet Panel

With Active Workspace 3.0 you have the ability to perform a search from the in-context panel.

• Search for data in-context and filter data based on facets or filter box (similar behavior to global search)
• Configure the in-context search to a pre-defined set of type filters. Data belonging to types outside of the pre-filter will not appear in the in-context search results.

Search for data based on date ranges

You can now perform a search by typing in a date range syntax into the search box.

• Search for data based on a date range
• Search for data based on several date rangers

Last, but not least Active Workspace also provides search enhancements for your Teamcenter administrators and IT team.

Active Workspace 3.0 now supports SOlr 5.x:

• Active Workspace support for SOLr 5.1 provides several advantages as listed in the publicly available release notes from Apache SOLr
• Several perceived enhancements for Active Workspace 3.0 are as below:
• Improved performance of the SOLr queries
• Improved support for more complex queries (joins, etc.)
• Support for indexing complex data types such as two-dimensional properties (matrix or table properties)

SOLr High Availability (no Single Point of Failure)

• Active Workspace 3.0 provides support for Teamcenter to communicate with an alternate SOLr URL in case the primary URL is unreachable – failsafe mode

This concludes my post, I hope you find this quick overview of Active Workspace 3.0 search enhancements informative.

Active Workspace 3.0 is available today!

Please contact your account representatives to learn more about Active Workspace 3.0 and upgrade your Active Workspace deployment to take advantage of these new capabilities.