“Networking” is not only the central keyword of AUCOTEC's Engineering Base (EB) collaboration platform. At AUCOTEC, the concept of networking also underpins the company's operations and its collaboration with customers and partners. This is demonstrated by the EBDN Developer Network, an internal exchange platform created specifically for software developers. “Our customers and partners can not only find tips, tricks, application examples, and even code samples tailored to their individual EB assistants in C# (.NET) or VBA, but can also publish their own code examples to help others,” explained Oliver Heine, Team Leader Alpha Client at AUCOTEC.

A Platform for Growth

It all began with a strong team of AUCOTEC developers and a desire to exchange ideas more easily and transparently across the entire team. “The idea arose to open this network to customers and partners as well,” said Heine. This vision gave rise to EBDN, which combines an open social network with a forum moderated by AUCOTEC. “This means that not everyone has to reinvent the wheel, which would only consume unnecessary resources. It also reduces the burden on technical support, which would otherwise have to contact us about programming issues anyway,” Heine said enthusiastically.

Since the platform was launched in 2016, more than 300 customers and over 100 AUCOTEC colleagues have contributed around 450 answers or code examples. “Access rates are continuing to rise because demand grows with the complexity of customer projects,” said Heine. Documentation for EB's web services, which are unique in the engineering environment, will also be published by the fall at the latest.

EBDN has three different communication levels, each accessible with the appropriate permissions. One is exclusively for AUCOTEC developers, where the platform serves—consistent with the EB principle—as a single source of truth or central repository for their documentation. At another level, AUCOTEC developers communicate with developers from external partners. Finally, there is an area where customers, partners, and AUCOTEC developers can all exchange ideas.

Impressed by Creativity and Usefulness

As soon as a new version of EB is released, all shared APIs become available on the network. “We only need to document our source code. Uploading it to EBDN happens automatically,” said the IT specialist. For each API access function, users can also track what changed compared with the previous version, such as whether functions were added or modified.

Oliver Heine was particularly enthusiastic about the exchange among developers: “I am always impressed by the creativity and helpfulness of our customers! AUCOTEC employees usually answer ‘how-to’ questions, but customers also contribute excellent solutions.” Anyone can read, comment on, or define specific code examples. The question of the most efficient way to retrieve certain attributes of EB objects was answered long ago. For similar questions or keywords used for searching, EBDN quickly displays all corresponding entries. Users can also find answers on how to update catalog objects through a web service, copy all related associations in addition to a function, and much more.

Unique Transparency

The specialist also highlighted that all APIs documented in EBDN ensure data integrity in EB. “Because we use them ourselves, we can also guarantee particularly high test coverage.” This is another reason Oliver Heine wants to draw even more attention from software developers to the platform. His conclusion: “With EBDN, we make customization much easier for our customers and ensure that their data model cannot be improperly manipulated. The platform creates unique transparency and offers a service unavailable in any other engineering system!”