Common Questions: Automation in Arbortext

This week’s topic: Out of the box automation in Arbortext

We're purposefully scoping this subject down for this post. We're answering questions about what automation features come OOTB in Arbortext. If we didn't limit this discussion, we could easily write 1000+ pages.

Arbortext ships a mountain of documentation and sample files that the foundation for programming Arbortext. There are 3 manuals that ship with Arbortext—Customizer's Guide, Programmer's Reference, and Arbortext Command Language Guide. Each manual is about 250 pages long. (If you launch the Help Center and expand the "Programming" "book", you'll see both the HTML and PDF versions of all three manuals.)

Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher (APP) can run totally lights-out for years and years. Many, many customers are using it in this configuration today, completely automating their publishing activity for magazine-quality print output. Arbortext Content Manager (ACM) (Windchill) provides numerous mechanisms for automating business processes with their workflow engine.

Automating, configuring, adapting Arbortext to your environment is a big topic, but today, we're going to look at a little slice: We're answering some of the more common and general questions about out-of-the-box automation in Arbortext.

Question: Background processing

Can you generate a PDF file or an online help system in the background?

Answer:

Yes.

Arbortext Publishing Engine supports both queuing and publishing rules (for multiple publishing requests via 1 click). Publishing rules were part of the latest version, released earlier this year.

Question: Batch Processing

Do you support batch processing to multiple outputs from a single command?

Answer:

Yes

Question: Automatic check-in

Are published documents (deliverables/outputs) automatically checked into the repository?

Answer:

Yes

Question: Association to source

Can outputs be automatically associated with source documents through metadata?

Answer:

Yes, this is OOTB/default behavior in Windchill.

Question: Metadata support

Is metadata for contributing documents (files) automatically assigned to published output for check-in?

Answer:

Yes

Question: Delivery targets

Are publication directories (both internal and external) automatically populated?

Answer:

Yes

Question: Publish via Workflow

Does the CMS (publishing system) support automated publishing (batch mode without operator support) that can be triggered by an author request, workflow event, or end-user request?

Answer:

Yes