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What are best practice for working with documents without using DTI

sgylden
2-Guest

What are best practice for working with documents without using DTI

Hi

 

We are very close to dropping DTI due to issues we see with it, mostly issues related to lack of support for mixed office versions.

 

So instead we look into using the Browser with preference for "Use Basic Browser functionality" for download and upload.
- We would not like to use java for this, and this option will also be removed anyway.

 

This is however also giving us 'challenges' so I hope that someone can tell me how they use this.

 

Main issue is that the browser will not delete local cache files on check-in, so the file to download might already exist in downloads area and the new download will get a name with addition of (1), and next time (2) and so on. So you need to be very careful - what version are you editing and what to check-in. We see people messing this up.

How do others handle this?

Best Regards, Soren

 

6 REPLIES 6

This also has the side effect that you are not shown your latest change if it wasn't checked-in, the browser will just download the old version from the server and show you that. It will not open the cached file with your changes!

sm
1-Newbie
1-Newbie
(To:sgylden)

You did not mention what version of Windchill you are running. DTI supports Offce 2010, 2013 and 2016. Curious to know what types of issues you were having in a mixed Office environment? DTI only supports Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Are you not running all the same versions on a single machine or are you running different versions on different machines? Do you have a Technical Support ticket this was investigated under?

If I remember correctly, the documents will simply go to the browser cache if DTI is removed. If users don't understand how to use the browser cache, they will more than likely lose their documents since they do not understand where they are or how to find them again. For me, this means using the best practice of always choosing the Download action in Windchill to make sure the document is located in a place the user is aware of, ie. Downloads folder.

You're second comment is correct. Once DTI is removed, it is very easy to lose local documents that were modified and not checked in. Without DTI, Windchill does not know you have previously downloaded a document and will always pull the latest file from the server, potentially overwriting your local file.

Would be nice if Windchill allowed you to drag-n-drop upload and download documents from the folder browser. This would be a big help for non-DTI implementations.

BrianToussaint
19-Tanzanite
(To:sm)

Scott,

The last time I looked Office 2016 was not supported on 10.2 M030 and wasn't supported until 11.0.  Has this changed?

Thank you,

Brian

No, the support is as you stated. Office 2016 is available with Windchill 11 only. Personally, I have been using 10.2 M030 with Office 2016 for a few months now without any major issues, but I do understand the "official" support policy.

sgylden
2-Guest
(To:sm)

 

Hi Scott

Thank you for your reply.

We are running 10.2 M30 CPS14

We were actually quite happy with 10.2 M30 as the strange DTI errors we saw in 10.2 M20 were gone.

We use Office 2010 except for Visio and Skype that are newer versions.

This gives us message "Windchill Office Integration unable to start"

We have talked with Vikram on this issue and there are no fix - case 12175017 with reference to 105964

But running DTI without office integration makes some things behave differently

1- It will ALLWAYS download office document from server regardless of local checkout and updated version, this is a very serious error – case 13102495, seen in CPS14 but not in CPS9 ??

2- Files associated to open with Wordpad will not check in updates, case 13173559 SPR 609115

3- We had a few times seen that primary file was not being checked in for Word files, so updates were lost. I did not mange to see it myself and catch any log files.

4- Harder to remove PDMLink attributes from files

 

Then the general issue: Duplicated file name when doing Copy (ctrl C + V) and no way to change file name later - case 13180284

 

drag-n-drop upload is actually supported in Chrome (and Firefox I think), and yes a similar download would be great.

 

BR Soren

 

sm
1-Newbie
1-Newbie
(To:sgylden)

Thanks for the update. I'll take a peek at all this next week to see what I can find out for you. Sounds like Vikram is already aware of some of the issues, which is great.

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