Enhancement requests

[dgallup]

I know PTC has a new name for enhancement requests and I know there is a place for it somewhere in the black hole that is the PTC Communities web site but I'll be d@mned if i can find it. So I'm turning to the real source of PTC info and asking where in he!! do I submit an ehancement request to PTC these days?

What I want to suggest is to be able to right click on a folder in the "Common Folders" area of the file browser and have the option to make it the active folder. I see no other use for the "Common Folders" area what so ever. Maybe it has some use for those with PDM systems but to those of us still working strictly from a folder system, I always shange the working directory to where my files are before doing anything else.

I would also like to be able to take "Desktop" and "Computer" and "My Documents" off the "Common Folders" area because those are not places I would ever want to open or save a CAD file. But that is a battle for another day.

PTC quality philosophy: We've upped our quality standards. Up yours.

[agioultouridis]

Hi David,

Correct, PTC has changed the process for submitting enhancement requests. The functionality has moved to the PTC Community and is now termed a 'Product Idea'.

Here is the link: http://communities.ptc.com/ideas

The nice thing about the new Product Idea function is that all of our peers have visibility into what we are asking for, and have the ability to vote on the topic. The hope is that as a Product Idea gains popularity that the PTC developers will take notice and hopefully implement the concept. One other nice feature of the Product Idea is that we have visibility into where PTC is going with the enhancement requests (if it does get selected).

Hope the above helped.

Cheers,

Alex

[BrianKrieger]

Yes, the Common Folders tab is very useful for those in PDMLink, etc.

FWIW, you can rmb and set working directory from the folder tree list:

[cid:image001.png@01D003EA.754151B0]

Or from the file>Open dialog box.

[cid:image002.png@01D003EA.754151B0]

Not sure if that’s what you meant by current folder or not, but hey, it beats a sharp stick in the eye.

BK

[JLG]

You do have the option of adding your own folders to the Common Folders:

[cid:image003.jpg@01D003ED.50CDEE30]

It’s handy for any library folders that you have, to make access to them easy.

I agree, it would be nice to use the common folders to set the working directory.

Kind regards,
Janet Grove

[rrich]

So let me get this straight. This is how we are to enhance the PTC product now. Geeee I see it is going well! Looks like in two years there are 20 posts. But let’s dig deeper. Only 15 of them are open for voting. 1 has no plans to implement. One is current functionality. 2 are for future consideration (if one year and a few months is not in the future what is it). One is under consideration (a name change more than a year old). So how long does voting go on for. One has 4 votes and is still open 2 years and 7 months later.

In short this is not working at all…….Maybe the enhancement should be to enhance this procedure.

Ron

[dgschaefer]

Actually, that link (

[rrich]

Doug,
Thanks, that is much better, but still there leaves a lot to the imagination. Sorting by most popular from any time you get a 2.5 year old post with 192 votes for something that should be a no brainer. Multi CPU support for regeneration. And second most with 128 votes is to add spaces to file names. Both of these should be being worked on by PTC but they are still in voting process. I still think this process needs some work and PTC focused support.

Ron

[dgallup]

Thanks to all for the links, my brain did not associate Product Ideas with software ehancements.

That Product Ideas page is a diaster, there is no way to search through them, only sort them by meaningless terms like "most popular" or filter by equally meaningless terms like "Under consideration". There is a search box at the top of the page but it searches all of PTC communities so is useless.

When I started to create a new "Product Idea", the site actually did an active search as I typed my title and I found an old submission that is eactly what I wanted to ask for. So I voted for that one but now I can't find it again! So PTC CAN search & sort this stuff but won't give us the tools to do it.

I know all the existing ways to change the working directory, I just want to get some useful functionality out of the "Common Directories" that PTC forced upon us to be able to pick there and change the working directory. As it is, I have absolutely no use for that bloated chunk of screen real estate.

In Reply to Doug Schaefer:

Actually, that link (http://communities.ptc.com/ideas) is for product ideas for the PTC community site itself. The link to product ideas for Creo proper is here:

http://communities.ptc.com/community/creo?view=idea

Be aware, that you’ll need to be logged into the community and have an active maintenance account to see them. Otherwise, you’ll get some kind of “not found” error on the website.

How you get there is to ptc.com, hover on “Communities” on the upper right, and then click “PTC Community” under “Network” in the menu that pops up.

Once there, click the PTC CREO link at the left end of the menu bar. On that page, log in (link in the upper right) and then you’ll find the “product ideas” tab near the top of the page.

The navigation of the site is a disaster (and that’s charitable), but there is a lot of activity (easily 4X what PTCUser generates) and a lot of good info there.

--

[StephenW]

The idea you voted on is

[StephenW]

Oh and easier to add an image…

[cid:image001.jpg@01D004A1.22893ED0]

[dgallup]

I never got to the results page because it puts up a display of the matching content as soon as you start typing in the search box. When I say all the garbage it was returning I gave up hope. Maybe if I spend a more time there I’ll eventually learn to like it.

Regards

David R Gallup
Advanced Design Engineer
Alternate Energies

[StephenW]

I have to say that there are aspects of the community I like better than the exploder. But my overriding opinion is the exploder is easier to participate in and I can answer a simple question with a direct response back to the person asking the question in seconds. With the community, I have to click the link, log in (if my login has expired, and it does daily at noon or something like that), and hit the reply button. It’s not bad, it’s just not as easy.

Participation on the community is very good, better than the present day exploder. There are a few user who seem to be always answering. PTC has a couple of support people who answer questions regularly. It’s not a bad setup, I just don’t prefer it over the exploder.

[rastheimer1]

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!

[kimndave9]

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.

[kimndave9]

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.)