Remove Export Configurations... Option

[bquartier]

1. Describe your environment:

What is your industry? 

Heavy manufacturing

What is your role in your organization?

CAD Product Manager/Product Owner

Describe your stakeholders.

Design engineers

2. What version of Creo Parametric are you currently running?
Creo 7.0.5.0

3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.

When users are trying to modify their local config.pro in their Start-in directory, they will mistakenly use the "Export Configurations..." option, which will export ALL configurations, even those set at the corporate level in the loadpoint directory. The effect is that their Start-In directory config.pro conflicts with corporate settings if they were to change.

4. What is the use case for your organization?
Our config administration allows Start-In directory config.pro modifications, but users are not trying to export entire config.pro, only those which they have modified.

5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?
Removing the "Export Configurations" would greatly reduce the number of support tickets we have to deal with to resolve config.pro conflicts that users have unknowingly created for themselves. 

[BenLoosli]

Educate your users in the proper usage of the config.pro and how to save only the modified options to their local config.pro.

Making an additional config.pro option to allow/disallow the export would be a viable option to partially solving this issue.

I have 4 config files that get loaded when Creo starts. Config.sup and config.pro from the <loadpoint>/text folder, a home directory config.pro that my start up script over writes at every launch and the start-in folder config.pro that the users can make changes to. The home folder config.pro is sued to control options for different groups of users for setting their Windchill system and default files that are different for them.

[bquartier]

@BenLoosli - I have 6000 users! - of course we have education in place, but not everyone is going to use it or retain it. The real problem comes from newer folks, or people that aren't deep into customizing their Creo experience. Those people are trying to make a change to their config.pro for the first time, and have no idea that making the change and closing the options window is what would prompt the system to save it to your config.pro. So they see a big button that would seemingly do what they want, and they use it... and it does what they want! They just don't have any idea that it also exports every other configuration as well. 

Config options to disallow export all (which is what the Export Configurations... button does) would work just fine. Or even just a button in the options that will allow users to save their config changes. It's much easier for someone to see a button that does what they want and correctly use it, in contrast to a button that does something they don't want. It's just bad UI design if a user - presumably someone who has been using computers their whole life - is led by the UI into doing something wrong. They shouldn't need to be trained how to do it.

[BenLoosli]

Yes, education only goes so far with some people. At least the Options drop down on the right when selecting export only exports the the current settings shown in the window again.

I have told my users to not save the file but go to the disk copy of config.pro and enter the command in there to be sure they don't save wrong information to their local config.pro. But this too is subject to them remembering to not do an export. 

[olivierlp]

Thank you @bquartier for your idea. Based on the information you provided, we are acknowledging it as the Community management team. This is not a commitment from the Product team. Other users may comment and vote your idea up.

[mkron]

We have this same issue. We have educated but when new users come in, it is hard to cover everything. I discovered one of our engineering groups actually had documentation (that they own and system admins didn't know about) that told users to Export Configurations after changing the environment background. Maybe it's not removing the Export Configurations button but having a straightforward warning of what they are about to do.

Probably a different idea but we see the same things with Save All vs Save Changed in mapkeys. A lot of users that have copies and copies of the system mapkeys, which eventually causes issues.