I've been unhappy with how things have gone after our company was acquired recently; and have decided to retire (Aug 1) and find something else interesting to do - which hopefully will allow making a living for lots more years. Lots of possible good situations but I'm looking at many options. May in fact attempt something like what is suggested below.
If the Exploder were to disappear and some entrepreneur came up with a replacement which was equal or better, I would willingly pay some Pandora-like annual subscription fee to be a member.
For 15 years now I've carefully read every posting - and learned more from these than from all other sources combined; good answers usually come within minutes. As many of you know, I've posted both a lot of questions and a lot of answers over the years as well - hopefully at least some of these have been helpful.
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I'm actually very impressed with the PTC community site - it works extremely well (have spent many hours exploring it). Just hasn't had the passion that is evident on the Exploder it seems. Maybe there just needs to be some additional involvement of users to get some of the practicalities addressed (e.g. companies who disallow social media).
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After a career in mechanical design of automated equipment in which one simply bought things from suppliers and expected them to work, along with documentation that could be used, I have continuously been surprised at the feelings customers / users have for PTC:
"We buy and use your products (at premium $) but continually experience them not working very well and the documentation is really not usable."
How can this be? In any case, rather than complaining, it seems like a good opportunity. I truly love being part of this worldwide community of passionate committed, hard-working people committed to helping their organizations do great things with the software and systems. Such a wealth of knowledge, and such eagerness to share - valuable to all.
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Can't resist - just one more editorial...
I got thru engineering school, and did ok on Calculus and such. All engineering projects generally went ok for lots of years. I got relatively proficient at Pro/E w/o too much trouble. But - When I started reading and trying to understand and apply Windchill documentation (after 8 days of PTC Windchill admin training that was useless) I felt overwhelming dumb. Surely this strange incomprehensive way of presenting how-to info could not be intentional! But - It continued that way for 10,000 pages of PDF's - all of which I've studied carefully over the past 12 years. Now, it feels good to know how some of this stuff works pretty well - in direct proportion to how hard it was to understand and confidence in it. For sure, no person at PTC ever attempts to read / use their documentation. Seems that there is opportunity to just make many of the how-to's for Windchill admin's readily accessible to the average admin user and that's what I'm warming up to the idea of attempting.
Thanks for reading this far 🙂 Looking for some encouragement and practical suggestions.
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