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Community Manager
April 19, 2017
Question

April eSupport Updates: Connected Case Logger, Improvements to the Proactive Zone, Recommendations, Proactive Notifications, and Release labels corrected.

  • April 19, 2017
  • 21 replies
  • 7280 views

Our April web release is primarily aimed at increasing convenience and helping connected customers to get ahead of problems.

For customers who are not yet taking advantage of the benefits of proactive support, connecting is straightforward and free.

 

Connected Case Logger.

When opening cases, eligible customers will now be able to select connected products from the product list.

  • After entering system details, you'll no longer be prompted to enter any other information PTC already has on record about your system
  • The engineer who handles your case will be able to access info about your system, reducing ,and in some cases removing entirely the need to send data to PTC
  • Creo and Windchill are covered in this release. Integrity and ThingWorx will follow soon.

 

For a 2 minute overview see below:

 

Proactive Zone and Recommendations

Several of you shared feedback on the Proactive Zone, introduced in the December release, and we took some steps to accommodate early requests.

This time, the experience has been revamped to be more seamless, surfacing the most relevant proactive information to enable you to take earlier preventative actions.

Amongst the changes:

  • Widget loads inline and has a progress indicator; no more "page jumping"
  • Widget text has been simplified and the number of pending recommendations is shown
  • Recommendation lists and the recommendation viewer now contain recommendation details for Windchill
  • Completed recommendations are hidden by default, and accessible by checkbox

 

Proactive Notifications in eNews and Alerts

You'll no longer receive emails about Recommendations which you have set to "Snoozed", "Ignored" or "Completed", allowing you to focus on the recommendations you are tracking.

 

Granting Access to the Performance Advisor

For those customers who would like to grant read-only access to their performance advisor data to a partner (or any other PTC account holder), an option will be made available soon to enter an email address.

 

Creo and Integrity Release Values

To our relief, and no doubt yours too, a longstanding issue with Release names for Creo and Integrity products has been resolved.

Previously, some articles displayed what appeared to be a "duplicate" product name in the applies to field. The product names have now been removed from our release values, leaving the "Applies To" field much cleaner.

 

OLD release info:

old_release_info.jpg

NEW release info:

  new_release_info.jpg

 

Other Changes this Release

 

For a full set of release notes for the April 13th ("17.2") web release, see here.

21 replies

23-Emerald IV
April 19, 2017

Peter Case‌, I like where this is going but I'm curious why the datecode has to be entered before the Creo connected system can be selected.  You already know the datecode of each UUID, why not just let users select the UUID alone?  It seems redundant to have the datacode listed twice on the same form.

Also, the ability to use the UUID to select a system really highlights the need to either use the real hostname for the system (that has already been uploaded to PTC) or use a custom name (like on the Windchill side).  See Possibility to change email form mask in Windchill notifications - display sender with "Name, First name" instead of ema…

23-Emerald IV
April 19, 2017

Most of my Windchill systems have been given "friendly" names but when creating a new case only one of these friendly names actually shows up.  Any idea why?

  

Edit:  To compound the issue, the lists don't match.  Some of the GUIDs that are listed in the case logger aren't available in Performance Advisor and conversely, some of the GUIDs listed in performance advisor are not available in the case logger.  Had to switch back to the old way to create a case...

PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
April 20, 2017

Hi Tom Uminn,

Thanks for sharing this early feedback. You've zoned in on the area where we had the most iterations on the design (read: "challenges").

The dichotomy we faced was not to undo the previous work we had put in to de-cluttering the UI, yet still to harvest a system ID to improve the later case-opening and investigation experience.

As Creo was a special case (no current ability to give a user-friendly "GUIDName" as you mention below, and some accounts having 1000+ connected systems), we used datecode as an intermediate filter, and made the 30 character UUID optional.

Populating the datecode if a user pastes in a UUID as you suggest should be fairly trivial. I'll check if we can include this for the early June release.

We're also intending to add capabiliies to "select recent", which should improve the experience further.

PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
April 20, 2017

Tom Uminn

We'll dig into why there is an inconsistency here.

One possible explanation for the missing user-friendly GUIDNames is that they were just added, and not picked up by the daily cron which updates the back end data cache.

I'll report back once we've investigated. Sorry for this inconvenience.

23-Emerald IV
April 20, 2017

One possible explanation for the missing user-friendly GUIDNames is that they were just added, and not picked up by the daily cron which updates the back end data cache.

All of my friendly names have been in place for at least 6 months so this is not due to a recent change on my end.

Marco Tosin
21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
April 20, 2017

Hi Peter,

I have waited one more day before replying to this article, to see the exact behavior of Proactive information.

Yesterday my daily eNews had a total of 15 proactive information (but only the last 10 was listed, like you said in an old discussion) while in My Support Recommendation I saw only the 6 in tracking state.

This happens because I received recommendation that are in Completed state for old servers that were deleted by R&D from the list of my connected servers.

Today I had a total of 16 (but only the last 10 was listed) while in My Support Recommendation I saw only the 7 in tracking state.

Strangely I have 1 new recommendation despite NONE of my 5 server has new Transmitted data in my dashboard.

Marco
PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
April 20, 2017

Hi Marco Tosin, could you please forward to me the emails you received? If you could highlight the recommendations which are coming from the old servers (the completed ones which R&D deleted), and also the unexpected new recommendation, wihch is not in sync with the PA dashboard, that will help with the investigation.

Marco Tosin
21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
April 20, 2017

Just sent.

Thanks for your help.

Marco
PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
April 28, 2017

Hi Marco Tosin

Our developers suspect that some of the files were not pushed in the latest web release, which may have led to this issue.

A new code push was made yesterday (which also included a "select most recent" connected system in the case logger)

Could you please check today's batch of notifications and let us know if you are still seeing recommendations which are in a state <> "Tracking" ?

Many thanks

PeterCaseCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
April 28, 2017

Hi Tom Uminn

Sorry for my late reply here. We will be pushing a fix next Thursday, May 4th, which will sync what you see in the case logger with the data in the Performance Advisor. This said, having checked the current Performance Advisor data we have for Transmatic's systems, we only see 8 unique Windchill GUIDs, of which 2 have a defined name. Can you confirm whether some of your GUIDs have been removed or merged since posting this thread ?

Thanks,

Peter.