Enhancement requests

For better or for worse, I helped stand up the new Enhancement Request system when I was a product manager at PTC. A couple of things that may be helpful:

1. If you submitted an idea you can go under "Your Stuff" at the top right corner of the page to see Ideas that you submitted.

2. There is a link "Filter by Categories and Tags" below the Product Ideas header on the Product Ideas page. If the idea was submitted with good tags this will make it easier to find.

3. As for how long are ideas open for voting, you can go to the "Need Help?" link at the top right corner of the page, which will give you a link to this page http://communities.ptc.com/tags#/?tags=ideas_help The process that I helped put in place suggested that the Product Managers would review the top ideas quarterlyhttp://communities.ptc.com/docs/DOC-2529This was subject to change based on the amount of activity on the community, so this may have changed since I left more than 1 year ago.

If you are part of the Technical Commitees (or know someone who is), I'd suggest you bring this up to make sure it keeps running. I will do my part when I cam there in January. I put too much effort into this to let it fail!

PTC pays little attention to enhancement requests, unless maybe if you manage 2000 seats somewhere*.

I don't know if it is a financial or a philosophical thing. Back in the day, enhancements were put off due to 'the next release' problem. They couldn't ever consider any enhancements, claiming the next release was already in work and the release after that was already closed to new features, which put any enhancement out at least 2 years. Then, of course, the software would be changed enough that the enhancement description didn't fit so into the toilet with them.

What is more frustrating is that PTC makes changes to the functionality of the software and then generates weak supporting documentation for the changes. Or, for example, this waste of time in config options:

In Creo 3: allow_freeze_failed_assy_comp NEW
In Creo 2: freeze_failed_assy_comp DELETED in Creo 3.

Really, it's required to change the name of the config option by adding the prefix 'allow'?

Personal favorite was my request that PTC extract the Postscript header and footer from the executable and copy them in from an external file as part of PS output so that companies could customize them OR at least change the setlinecap and setlinejoin commands to each use a value of 1**, so that PS output would match what pen plotters made and what the default font "FONT" was designed to use. INSTEAD PTC added these controls to the direct export of PDF files. Which is not what making them external would have done and doesn't fix PS output. With them external it's easy to add watermarks or other custom info. This has been a problem going back to Rev 12.

I also think PTC has the submission policy backwards anyway. They only accept and appear to value suggestions from paying maintenance-current customers. These are the users who are -already- paying and are using the software as-is. They aren't going to be a source of new funds so why bother listening to them?

*I recall that sheet metal would refuse a thickness over .25 or so, until a Big Green company mentioned that they were forming parts from thicker material and then magic happened and sheet metal could be 1 inch thick or more.

**this would mean changing 1 bit in each of 2 bytes of the source code. A staggering amount of effort, apparently.

It's no surprise that PTC Community has more participation, given that PTC Sales and Support is unlikely to ever mention that PTC/user exists. I also think that since PTC/user requires a login to see messages that Google is unable to index it and give it any priority as a place to find answers. Now that PTC essentially owns the PTC/Live conference, there isn't even a track back from that direction to find PTC/user.

One area I'd like to see as part of the help system is a Pro/E|Creo|PTC software wiki. It's the only data structure I've seen that can tie existing information together. It would plainly replace PTC Community and be adjunct to PTC/user. For those problems that are solved, the best answers for each version of software would have a place, and they could include images, links to video tutorials, links to other websites, et al. A given topic may apply to a number of modules, and could have links from the related sections of those modules.

The present scheme on PTC Community is unmanagable. Topics are fixed to individual pre-determined scopes, there's no way to weed out the responses which don't work from those which do, and so on. While the same can be said for the accumulation of answers here, PTC/user provides direct peer-to-peer communication ability and direct e-mail access (initiate message thread,) thus avoiding the stigma of social web sites that company management sees.

With a wiki, there is a place to move the good information without exposing e-mails for spammers, allow incremental improvements to the documentation, include links to existing external information, manage change over time, and track utilization (page views, edits, links from other wiki pages.)