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Andy-
I'm no expert with them but can chime in a bit.
First, I believe the default is that they are off. To turn them on you do this through your utilities-->preference manager. Find the 'workspace frame stack size' and set it to anything greater than zero.
Frames don't work quite as they did in Intralink. Intralink was quite linear I'm sure you'll remember, you could undo and redo things only in a step by step fashion. In pdmlink, these things are called events and are no longer linear. you can go back and apply events that are not neccessarily in sequential order. Although this sounds like a benefit, I think because of the different nature of it, I find it a bit confusing. I would suggest experimenting with it a bit to get a feel for how you can apply events in this non-linear fashion.
Some things I don't like:
Not all 'events' trigger an event to be allowed to be applied. For example, if I look in my event manager right now, I see lots of events, only some of which may be applied. Most of the 'save' events are applicable, but oddly enough, not all. upload and download events don't trigger an applicable event, but a successful 'add' does. Like everything in this package (to me anyway), it's difficult to tell if it's got a mind of its own or is just a little bit wonky.
Descriptions of events leave a lot to be desired. It just doesn't seem as clear as it used to be. There is an info icon, and it helps, but just a little.
Some things that you might think of as one event are really several events. For example adding something to your workspace causes two events--download, and then add. I would suggest if you're used to using a frame stack of 10 that you double it to 20 just to make sure you're capturing about the right amount of frames that you intend to.
If you are new to pdmlink or windchill, then I would suggest everybody at your install have them turned on to start. That was my suggestion here, and for the people that didn't follow it, they ended up losing some work as they learned their way around the new 'add, update, check out' terminology--in some cases overwriting work when they didn't think they were, and with no way to recover if their frames were off.
So to sum, it's different, it bears experimenting with before you rely on it, or are comfortable with it, but it's worth it to have and almost impossible to imagine that there was a build of pdmlink that didn't include it.
-Randy