PTC eSupport Help Discussions

Normally when I create technical support cases the response time is very good.  The case will quickly get assigned to a technician and I will typically get a phone call (or email) within a couple of hours.  I'm having the exact opposite experience with the "Windchill Performance Advisor" product area.  It's almost like there is no one assigned to monitor cases created for this product.Most recent example:Case created on July 12thRealized on July 15th that no one had contacted me or even been assigned to the case yet so I escalated it.  Almost immediately I received a call from a manager promising that a tech would contact me on the next business day.  He then asked if I could de-escalate the case, which I did.July 25th (today) - The case still hasn't been assigned to anyone and I'm still waiting for the first contact.I'm also noticing that this "product" isn't listed in the All Products list when filtering existing cases.  Not under "Performance Advisor" a

Something is going on with the "Share by Email" links today.  This doesn't happen on every article, only certain ones.  I did confirm with both IE and Chrome.  Two examples:https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS50729https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS29630(Tagging Pierre Maraninchi‌ and Peter Case‌.)

A valuable feature of many successful websites is the ability to serve up some "other stuff" associated to the product / service / literature you're interested in. For commercial sites, the motivation is clear: "Other customers also bought.." draws attention at the right moment (when interest is high), reduces search effort and leads to further (hopefully mutually beneficial) transactions.   When it comes to our articles, the currency is different (Knowledge), but the circumstances and outcomes are similar. If we expose related content at the right time, we can reduce your search effort, and guide you to other sources of knowledge to improve your experience with PTC's products.   So what's new and how do I use it ? The changes use our existing Search functionality to detect relevant content such as product documentation, help center topics, community threads, videos, and other articles. When this happens, a box like this will appear below the article Resolution field, with fa

The links to the product families on the support website are all broken (except for ThingWorx.)It looks like someone restructured the main website and forgot to update the support site.  Notice the change in destination:vs.P.S.  This probably isn't the right place, but I don't feel like hunting around on PTC's website to try and figure out where to submit this.

This may be in the wrong place, but I couldn't find a community for topics related to the tech support site.  If it is, Toby Metcalf‌, please move it. I get email notifications about new or updated KB articles relevent to topics I've chosen.  It seems that frequently these notifications link to articles that were published prematurely.  There is a title, and nothing more.  The title and description match completely but don't adequately describe what the article is about.  Sometimes it even refers to an SPR, but there is no link to the SPR.  It's as if the article was created as a place holder, but there wasn't enough information to complete it yet.Is it possible that these kind of preliminary articles can be made hidden until there's some real information to share?  It's frustrating to click a link to learn more and find that there is no more to learn.

It seems like there are many knowledge base articles that contain insufficient information to really be useful.  Here is an one example I came across today:  CS242245When I see something like this I start to ask questions like... "Works to product specification."  Really???  So Creo is intentionally not regenerating merge features?  Why?  Who actually writes that in the specification?  Is this behavior documented somewhere?  (Peter Case - This might be a good use case for "Related Documents" section to link to some relevant product documentation.)Here is what I posted to the feedback widget:It would be helpful to understand WHY this "works to product specification".Are you saying that anytime a merge feature fails to regenerate, it is intentional and a good thing?Under what conditions WILL it regenerate the merge feature and under what conditions will it NOT?Anything you can do to provide better explanations of how things work, why they work that

  In the last week or two, the format has changed for the WORST. Each software used to be broken into builds like we subscribe to, Creo Parameteric listed Creo 2 in one section followed by Creo 3 in the next section under Creo Parametric.     Now they all fall under on section called Creo Parametric and are all mixed together. It is this way for each subject. Now I have to hunt and pick for Creo 3 Parametric issues.   Has everyone else seen this regression?  

I'd like to thank Gord Mehta, David Lewis MIKE CRECELIUS‌, Brian Toussaint‌, Guy Yarter‌, Denise Welch‌, Robert Lee‌, Pavel Glukhov‌ and all the other customers who came to visit us in the UX Labs at LiveWorx 2016 - June 6-9, 2016 - Boston‌.   Kathleen Byrnes‌ our UX Designer collected a ton of feedback on the designs that we presented during the sessions. She'll categorize and prioritize all of it and will improve her prototypes accordingly. If there is anything you forgot to tell us during the session,feel free to use this community group to continue the conversation. Open a new Product ideas or share feedback in the discussion forum!   For those of you who could not attend LiveWorx or could not join the UX lab sessions, you can still have a look at one of the prototypes which is now in production and available for everybody to use. Even if you are not a ThingWorx user, we are interested in your feedback on the new Thingworx Developer eSupport Portal. Feel free to comment

The eSupport team will be present at LiveWorx 2016 - June 6-9, 2016 - Boston‌ and we are looking forward to meeting with you in person!   We will be part of the UX Labs from Monday to Thursday where we will be testing upcoming new designs for the eSupport portal and our web tools.   You can register here for one of the sessions where you will have the opportunity to discover some of our latest ideas and influence how the aspect and the features of the eSupport portal will evolve in the upcoming quarters. Each of those 1-hour sessions is individual and participants will be rewarded for their efforts and feedback by a pretty neat present !   See you soon in Boston!

A short notification for all who find video clips useful when exploring and discovering new functionalities of PTC’s software: Over 4000 educational videos from the PTC Learning Exchange were recently added to our Search page.   These high quality tutorials are created by product experts, and can greatly enhance the experience and value our customers derive from PTC's products. When you enter search keywords and one or more videos are available, a new content type will appear on the left hand side: Please let us know about your experience. We’re particularly interested on how we can keep improving the search to respond to your needs.

If you opened a case on Windchill Functionality or Business Administration recently, and your language preference is set to English, then the chances are you will have encountered Dylan: Here's some background to help you to get familiar with with him, so that you know what to expect.   At PTC, we're encouraged to "take a fresh look" at everything we do, and it turns out that the search UI we used to display when opening a case was not very effective at matching issue descriptions with the best knowledge to solve your problems on the spot. Most times, the right article was available, just not returned.   Getting a quick, convenient and effective solution to your issue is right up there on our list of priorities, and recent advances in data analytics and machine learning have given us some great opportunities to return relevant article suggestions in a much more focused way than the previous UI did. We also added some new features to help solve your issue with knowledge, incl

If you are new to the eSupport Portal, how can you get started? When you are struggling online but still can’t find what you need, what should you do?   The eSupport Portal is the entry point for all important eServices functions, including knowledge base search; software licenses management; software download and many more web tools… Below are 3 quick tips to get instant help online:   1. “Welcome to eSupport” Portlet Go through the educational materials under “Welcome to eSupport” portlet. These materials are the summary of the most important web functions. This can help you quickly get started. 2. Knowledge Base Search For eServices questions, you can also try searching in the Knowledge Base. Take “web account” as an example, there are many articles on how to create, delete and manage your web account.   3. “Search Overview” and “Advanced Search Techniques” To get help with searching the Knowledge Base, take a look at the “Search Overview” and “Advanced Search Tech

The PTC Technical Support Knowledge Base contains thousands of articles in English, Chinese and Japanese, all written by our team of Technical Support Engineers.  Every single article in our Knowledge Base has an article feedback widget which you can use to provide your feedback to us about the article, if it was helpful or not and a space for you to leave any comments you have for the authors. I say authors because an article can be created by one engineer but over time be updated by several different engineers.   When you leave verbatim comments using the feedback widget they get sent to our internal systems and recorded against the article. We have a team of “Knowledge Domain Experts”, or KDEs for short, who monitor the incoming feedback. The KDEs have the technical skills and expertise to triage the feedback and determine if further action needs to be taken, either by themselves or another Technical Support Engineer.   If you leave a comment that requires further fol

I was searching for information on the support status of Creo Elements/Pro 5.0 (CEP5). When I look at the product calendar:http://support.ptc.com/cs/product_calendar/PTC_Product_Calendar.htmI see no entries prior to Creo 2.0.  When I look at the archive calendar:http://support.ptc.com/cs/product_calendar/PTC_Product_Calendar_Archive.htmAnd browse to the Proe section:http://support.ptc.com/cs/product_calendar/PTC_Product_Calendar_Archive.htm#RANGE!A359There are no entries past Pro/Engineer WF1. That leaves a gap with no information on WF2, WF3, WF4, WF5, CEP5 and Creo 1:I opened a case with tech support, but when he browses the the archive calendar he sees much more information (I'm not sure about the main calendar):Is anyone else seeing what I'm seeing?

Good news everyone !   Many of you (~1,700 every month) take the time to leave valuable feedback on articles, which helps us to continually improve the quality of our Knowledge. Often, you help us see things we don't, and everyone benefits as a result. We saw from your comments that you weren't happy when our previous feedback widget covered the text in our articles. Although it only affected a small proportion of the articles in the knowledge base, we weren't comfortable with that either, and so we've made some changes.   We hope you'll like the new look, and that the simplified design will encourage you to share even more your thoughts with us when you are working with our Knowledge. Here's how the new widget will appear:     For those accessing articles from a tablet or low resolution screen (browser width below 1440 px), the widget will appear inline at the end of the document.   As we continue to ramp up our Knowledge infrastructure, more improvements are

Do you ever see the dreaded "Nothing here matches your search" error? Or do your searches return 1000s of hits when you are expecting just a handful?   If so, you're not alone. While Search was found internally to be 84% effective at resolving issues reported to Technical Support, only 50% of customers report the same success. Surprised by this gap, we had a look at the keywords entered on the portal to better understand why some searches worked, and others didn't. It didn't take long for some patterns to emerge.The good news is, by having a better awareness of how search works, and making just a few small adjustments, it's possible to significantly increase your search success.   Based on what we saw, here are the top 5 pitfalls, and how to avoid them:   Pitfall 1: "Prolific Pasting" Everyone likes to copy and paste. It saves effort, avoids typos, and can lead to more accurate search results. BUT pasting a lot of text can harm the relevancy of your results. Let's take a

The PTC Technical Support knowledge base contains a wide variety of articles written by our team of technical support engineers, with new articles being published every day. Did you know that you can have all this rich content delivered to your inbox daily or weekly? The PTC eNews & Alerts email subscription allows you to stay on top of the latest developments at a time that suits you.   With a single click you can subscribe to the articles you use the most:     You can also sign up for updates based on the Product, Release and Technical Area that you are interested in:     Based on those selections you can select to be notified just about articles related to SPRs and/or all types of articles. You can also opt to be notified when new articles become available and/or when existing articles are updated.   Last of all, the Preferences tab enables you to customize when the email hits your inbox.     So why wait, be the first to know when PTC T

Yes we love surveys. Until we had this space this was our main way to hear what you were thinking about the eSupport Portal. That's how we realized that our previous search engine was not meeting your expectations : we rolled the new one just a year ago and since then,the number of feedback related to the quality of the search results dropped significantly. That's also how we realized that our new License Management tools or our article feedback widget needed a refresh (both are currently in progress and we will share more about this in the near future...)   So, is the survey going away now that we have this community space ? Not really : the survey still allows us to evaluate in a factual way how you perceive the eSupport portal and how successful you are when you visit us. So let me tell us a bit more about how things work Whenever you visit the eSupport Portal, you might be sent a survey by email the next day, but not everytime : 1 survey per month per user max. For those of y

Every month, about 30,000 of you connect to the eSupport Portal to download the latest version of a PTC software, search our knowledge base, manage your licenses, browse the product documentation or do one of the many things the portal offers.   As the eSupport portal audience is growing and as the pace of changes to the eSupport Portal is accelerating, we thought it would make sense to find a better way for PTC to communicate and collaborate with customers. Having a dedicated space in the PTC Community seemed to be the best option as it will allow you to share enhancement ideas, read about the latest news and upcoming changes in our blog and get answers to your portal-related questions from portal power users and PTC employees in our discussion forum.   So let me introduce you to the core eSupport Portal team   Jenny Tian, based in our Shanghai (CN) office is in charge of our Globalization strategy and user education. She’d like people across the globe to have a great

I'm new to eSupport Portal. Where do I start ? Check our eSupport Portal FAQ Article. Account, Cases, Licenses, Knowledge Base it's covering it all! I'd like to suggest an enhancement to the eSupport Portal or one of the tools. Who should I talk to? Product ideas are the right channel to propose a change to the eSupport team. Check if your idea ha snot already been submitted. If not, create a new idea and other customers will comment on your proposal.The eSupport Portal team will review and comment on the most popular ones. I can't find anything in the Knowledge Base. What's wrong? We're sorry to hear this. Let's see how we can  help you out If our search engine is returning too much content, try to use one of our advanced search techniques to narrow down the number of results returned If  our search engine is returning too few results, we don't have content for this specific topic and you should start a discussion to talk about I have a problem with one of the eSup

Getting started with the Knowledge Base Federated Search on the eSupport Portal. This video will teach you how to use the core features of the KB search engine as well as some of the advanced tips and tricks. Additional advanced search techniques are available here.

To attach a file to your Reply, you have to click Use advanced editor link located in the top right corner of Reply window. Then click Attach link located in the bottom right corner of Reply window.Important note: Add Reply button is located at the bottom of HTML page. You have to scroll down to see it.

Anyone else seeing this?