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Please allow new ideas to be commented on for at least 4 years. Post that are not even 6 months old are already being archived and not being considered for incorporation into PTC products.
who else is a little put off by PTC's new archiving rules?
Pro/e user since 1992
There are good ideas that get in fact few votes, because most of Creo users do not come to the community foruns. I've been using PRo/E since version 17.0 and only recently (2 years) came to the community foruns or started making suggestions. Also, I think that the relevancy of suggestions should be balanced with the easy of implementation. Even if an ideia has few votes, but is quick to implement and doesn't need much time debugging should be considered. Reserve the most voted ideas before archiving for changes or improvements that require lots of development time (such as multi-threading Creo, good ideia, but lots of changes on the code base).
I am not so upset by the archiving of ideas. I am, however, very displeased with how few ideas get implemented, especially the ones that are just simple timesavers that are just missing. Simple improvements to everyday functions. There are so many simple ideas out there that would improve everyone's work.
But to be clear, I am hoping that this process will improve the participation of the product managers within PTC and will lead to more of these ideas being implemented.
I can just imagine my boss coming to me and saying, "hey, we have 28,000 (or some other made up number) customer improvement requests, can you take a day and go thru them and let me know which ones make sense to implement?"
There is no good way to accomplish the task without somehow making it manageable. Lets hope that this is a step in the right direction.
Keeping the ideas opened an not archiving them will cut help cut down on the number of posts being generated long term.
I keep finding idea posts where I too want to support it or think it's a good idea and now have to create another idea and the process starts over again. This can't be beneficial to PTC long term. They need to find a way to implement them quicker or risk losing customers. Now that I starting to use other CAD systems I'm finding alot of things we are asking for have already been implemented in those packages. Granted I'm still more easily able to create advance geometry in Creo for the time being.
It wasn't beneficial for PTC to ignore basic, customer requested improvements...long term or short term.
What is important now, TODAY, is getting them to start devoting the resources needed to start implementing product ideas or, at the very least, engaging with the community on why an idea can not or will not be implemented. It is interesting sometimes when you get to discuss things and learn that something that may sound so simple is actually a huge programming mess and is so risky to implement that the risk vs reward is not worth it.
They can not fix yesterday. We can encourage them to fix tomorrow.
For example, there are aparently simple suggestions to improve certain workflows (timesavers). One of them that I suggested aan year ago, was the possibility to select planes directly on the Coordsys, as is possible in NX, TopSolid 7, Catia, etc. It's a request not so complicated to implement from a programming resources point of view. PTC mightt anwser that there are workarounds, like creating an CSYS, and creating 3 planes offset at zero distance from each of the CSYS axis. So, we are not restricted in what we can do in Creo, but we are getting left behind in terms of time to do quick conceptual modeling, since we loose much more time to create those offset planes from a CSYS than users of other CAD packages. The ideia has merit, since reven SolidWorks 2022 has this as a new feature, ie, the possibility to select the sketch plane directly in any CSYS. There are lots of small suggestions (time saving feaures) that do not get feedback from PTC, nor votes from most of the forum viewers (most come to make new suggestions, and not to see what suggestions are already made to vote for them), but which seems that technical staff from other CAD packages monitor and implement it first in rival CAD packages. And here, this suggestion gets archived because of lack of votes. It's frustrating. I could give other examples of past suggestions, like "Parameter Groups" to be able to organize parameters in an easier way, instead of the Filters that PTC provides. These semantic parameter groups got incorportated into NX. Multiple parameter tables inside a part (or assembly), also did not get much votes or PTC feedback, but got incorporated into NX, and already existed in SolidWorks, Top Solid 7, etc. Here we have to make long relations with nested IFs ELSEs wich is more error prone and time consuming, when what we should have is functionality similar to Family Tables, but not for a whole part, but for features or features groups inside a part. This same suggestion got incroporated into NX after I already made the suggestion here, with no feedback.
Just in case you were wondering, this is the community rule PTC posted for product ideas:
https://community.ptc.com/t5/Welcome-How-To-s/Product-Ideas-Archiving-Policy/m-p/763583#M643
I did not understand the rational behind "archiving" (and not deleting) meaning the idea gets read-only if not voted enough. What's the purpose of seeing the published idea and not be able to vote any more? If it were to be deleted, it would mean that managers would not spending too much time reading, but since the ideas are not deleted and could be read anyhow, why block the vote?
Product managers can use the data any way they wish. They can filter and sort based on statuses and/or votes. I don't really know details.
I do know that just because an idea is archived or didn't get any or many votes, that doesn't necessarily disqualify it from consideration and/or implementation. It's not always about getting the most votes. Getting votes will definitely bring attention to an idea that maybe didn't get a product managers attention when originally posted. As an outsider, I don't know why some ideas seem to get product manager attention and others don't.
I was not able yet to see all the backlog of ideas, of the 238 web pages that currently exist. I think it would be better instead of archiving, to effectively delete old ideas that either got implemented or refer to "bugs" or "quircks" from the time of Pro/Engineer or Wildfire versions, or very old versions of Creo. Most related to the user interface. That would allow users to not waste too much time searching for ideas to vote for. Other thing that is annoying is that some of the ideas, such as the Bounding Box feature from 2018 got 203 votes, and only know do we know that it is under consideration. Another, "Real to string" in relations has already 191 votes, and is a very old idea from 2012, and I did not see it already existed, even when I searched for that, so I had posted a duplicate idea which got few votes. If the old idea gets archived or discarded, even if it's a good idea, and there is no feedback of why an idea does not make sense, users get discouraged from posting any further ideas, since for the most part, even ideas with lots of votes get ignored, so why would it be better with ideas wifh very few time to vote for?
@S_Edgenear wrote:
.. even ideas with lots of votes get ignored ...
It definitely seems that way...
I'm not aware of any commitment from product management to implement, or even respond to product ideas once they reach a certain number of votes. While community management is trying to change this paradigm, the responsibility to read, respond, and implement product ideas ultimately rests with product management. Unfortunately most ideas have been ignored (or at least not responded to) for so long, that attempting to wade through 238 pages of them now seems overwhelming.
The volume of new ideas per-day or per-week is very low, and very manageable. I think the key is to respond sooner, not later. I'm guessing the community would engage much more if product managers committed to responding to all ideas every time they reach certain vote thresholds (10, 25, 50, 100, etc.) They don't have to necessarily commit to implementing them at these low numbers, but at least they can give feedback early on to the validity of the idea. If a product manager know at 10 votes that a particular idea will never be implemented, say so right then and close the idea. Don't make people keep voting on it for five more years before they find out it will never be implemented. Maybe product management should go even further a provide a commitment that if a product idea reaches 200 votes, it WILL be implemented within the next two major releases (even if it means some other 'release theme' has to slide back).
I am a CAD designer, but also have knowledge of C/C++ programing, so, I know that some of the ideas, even if good ones and with a lots of votes, such as making the software multi-threaded to use all the cores of modern processors, that would take a long time to implement, and it's not at all an easy task, even if it's the most voted one. So, I understand that those ideas get "ignored". But some of the most voted for, such as "Real to String" function in relations, which is a much needed one, and any junior programmer would be able to implement in a few hours, it's incredible that it's not been implemented till now, even with the hundreds of votes that the idea received. Even the bounding box as a feature would not take much time to implement, since there's already an API to get that information, and the mold cavity manufacturing module already uses that API to create a workpiece. I get the impression that some of the easy to implement ideas are not implemented to "force" clients to obtain API licenses, but that only works for large enterprises, since most small companies do not have programmers to use the Creo APIs to implement what could and should be obtained from the licensed CAD software, and might backfire if some of those simple ideias are already implemented in most CAD packages,to which Creo competes in the market.
Yeah, the real-to-string one drives me nuts. People have been asking for it since at least 2004. It would be ridiculously easy for a developer to add it, and doing so would eliminate all the relations gymnastics that people have to perform today to get the equivalent. Frankly we should have functions to go back and forth between all of the supported data types: real-to-string, string-to-real, string-to-integer, boolean-to-integer, etc.
Not only that. I know that PTC is working to try to improve the ability to script Creo in Python to replace the very outdated Pro/Program (and mapkeys) to try to make it easier to let users with more basic programming skills to automate work that currently is not possible to do. But this work will take years and several versions to be able to be used by current Creo users. Since it's predictable that will take a long time to be released, there should be released additional functions to the relations, as you mentioned, but also making an user interface for the conditional (boolean parameter dependent) supression of features, as current modern CAD packages do. Having to deal with "Pro/Program" to try to conditionally supress features, with all that "noise" text in the middle is really frustrating and time consuming, which makes using Creo for repeated tasks very slow when those tasks could be automated. So, if something takes a long time to implement, but is very requested by users, PTC should try to make an interin simpler version of the requested idea.
The ideas @danders238 mentioned were less than 6 months old so they're probably getting caught in the new idea posting policy where a bunch of extra information has to be added to all new product ideas within two weeks or they will automatically be archived.