CIMdata review on SAP's PLM cPDm program (PDF) - Large ...

system and also provides the ability to interface to
other mail systems, such as Lotus Notes, Web mail
interfaces, and MAPI clients, which includes MS
Outlook.
System Administration
A system administrator normally handles the operation
and maintenance of the cPDm solution. This individual
or group of individuals look after the configuration of
the solution and its various components, defining its
users, assigning permissions to users, and maintaining
the database(s).
mySAP PLM provides many administrative capabilities
to manage a number of activities such as:
• Security and access control
• Tool definition and management
• User registration
• Group and role definition
In addition, mySAP PLM provides extensive customization
capabilities to configure the solution to userspecific
needs. These include:
• Definition of user profiles
• Network definition
• Numbering conventions for automatic ID generation
(e.g., for item numbers, document numbers, etc.)
The integration of enterprise portal capabilities and the
use of a role concept allows for easy-to-use and context-driven
assignment of work-related content. To make
the implementation of mySAP PLM a fast moving process,
SAP delivers its mySAP PLM solution with predefined
user roles, such as an ECM <strong>review</strong>er or designer.
Task- or user-specific menus and access authorizations
can be interactively defined and linked to the organizational
structure. Wizards have been introduced in some
areas (e.g., in SAP's Internet-based workflow system).
However, mySAP PLM does not provide Wizards for
all administrative areas today. All of these are defined
and are, with the exception of class data, dynamically
modifiable without disrupting production operations.
Changes to attribute field lengths and data models are
not permitted in the mySAP PLM solution. These
restrictions are enforced to ensure that a migration path
across mySAP PLM releases is available. These
restrictions are normally not as strictly enforced in
other cPDm solutions, especially core PDM systems.
Most modern PDM systems are built using objectoriented
programming with a focus on dynamic data
dictionaries and models that support interactive changes.
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SAP’s mySAP PLM
However, mySAP PLM implementers can append to
existing mySAP PLM tables, establish customer specific
tables, and create new objects in the mySAP PLM
data model.
Security controls in mySAP PLM include mappings
for users, groups, and roles according to various security
levels (authorization groups) and according to
various classes of data. mySAP PLM supports the specification
of those activities valid for an object. Each
user has a user authorization profile that contains their
authorization objects (activities they can perform in the
system). In addition, mySAP PLM supports special
security attributes that can be utilized on each "instance"
of an object. This security attribute can be activated
for special cases to enhance the normal security
controls.
In general, mySAP PLM is a negatively biased system.
In other words, the general assumption is that features
and data are not available to users unless the security
controls are established to indicate otherwise.
mySAP PLM provides administrator-controllable facilities
for archive and backup beyond those provided by
the operating environment or the underlying relational
database management system. Interfaces are available
to external vaults or repositories that can perform their
own backup and archival functions on data files.
Visualization
The typical image and visualization services that are
found within many cPDm-enabled environments are
document viewing engines that allow CAD and other
3D and 2D data to be viewed, annotated, and redlined.
mySAP PLM provides direct 2D and 3D viewing capability
through the integration of Vis products from
UGS. There are also numerous third-party application
providers that claim to have integration capabilities
with mySAP PLM. SAP has a complementary software
program where third-party providers can have their
interfaces certified for use with mySAP PLM.
The current release of mySAP PLM supports the direct
and two-way interactive link between the product
structure viewer and the associated visualization. This
allows a user to select a part on the product structure
and for it to be automatically selected on the visualization
and visa versa. This link has been created through
an integration development partnership between SAP
and UGS. To enable this, mySAP PLM manages the
<strong>CIMdata</strong> Program Assessment