December Web Release: Introducing the Proactive Zone, improvements to Subscriptions and more

[PeterCase]

On December 16th we introduced some changes which are aimed at helping you to connect your products to PTC for an enhanced support experience.

You'll see these changes if your company, or your online supervisor has switched on proactive support for your web account, or if you open cases with us on eligible products

For those who already connected, the new proactive tools will check whether you are getting the most out of our services, and if not, guide you to take greater advantage of what we have to offer. You'll see a new widget on the eSupport portal which displays your proactive status for eligible products.

Select  "Complete your journey" or "Learn More" to see the remaining steps for you to become fully connected and proactive:

See below for a short video overview of all changes in this area:

As well as the more visible changes around proactive support, we've also improved your experience with subscriptions, offering a more accurate and complete list of product families for better refinement of your bulletin preferences. For customers accessing the portal in Chinese or Japanese, we've fixed an issue with articles in your native language showing an “Article Not Found” error, when opened from a subscription email.

For a full list of other updates and fixes in the (16.4.1) December web release, see our Release Notes here

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Peter,

it seems that latest changes you made have disabled the possibility to add/delete subscription email.

See attached image.

[PeterCase]

Hi Marco,

Thanks for reporting this. We're looking into the problem and will address soonest. Sorry for any inconvenience.

[sbenke-2]

Hi Marco,

In Summary tab, we are listing user subscriptions. Please refer below URL to add/delete Software Update and Reference Documents Subscriptions.

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/subscriptions/subscriptions.jsp?p=tab_sftupdates

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Sagar,

thanks for your answer.

The link you provided is the right to update my subscriptions.

[mbakke]

Peter,

I have taken the journey and show 100% being proactive. Now how do I make that table disappear from my eSupport page?

[PeterCase]

Hello Mike,

Congratulations on completing your journey and getting fully connected! You can be sure that you're getting full benefit from your connected products. As mentioned in the short video for the December release, this is "V1" of the Proactive Zone, and we're aiming to gather as much feedback as possible to continue improving the features we offer. Right now, there isn't a way to dismiss the widget on completion, but we can consider this as an option for a subsequent release. Are others keen to see this ?

Do you have any other feedback to help us improve further ?

[mbakke]

Having some way to minimize or remove the widget would be nice. Between the banner which links to this page and the widget you're using a lot of web page area. It's nice to be able to see my widgets I have configured for quick glances at current support cases etc. without having to scroll half of a page.

So far I am not seeing any huge benefit but I can see the potential. Due to the private nature of our company I am not allowed to share the Windchill system information at this time but the only Creo advice has been marked as "difficult" to troubleshoot as it pertains to stability. Many of our stability issues tend to be with Windchill (local cache) or specific to our models.

[TomU]

Ditto to what MIKE‌ said.  I shouldn't have to keep looking at these (and waiting for them to load) every time I visit the support page:

Once the journey is complete, they should go away!  🙂

[PeterCase]

Thanks Tom and Mike.

We do have a Change Request recorded to be able to dismiss the banner and as it's been 2 weeks, I've just expired the current one.

I'll pass the feedback on to our Proactive Support team about the desire to automatically remove the Proactive Widget to free up space once complete, so they can consider this in their V2 design.

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Peter,

I would like to inform you that, despite all my Windchill recommendations are in Completed state, I still have 9 of them in the daily mail from TS.

See attached images.

It is the intent behavior or there is some issue?

Thanks.

[Marco_Tosin]

I posted the comment too early.

[PeterCase]

Hi Marco,

Sorry for the delay while I checked the specs for these notifications with our business systems and integration team.

As you've discovered, we still send out notifications for recommendations when they are set to a status <> "Tracking"

The rules we currently apply are:

- Only Recommendations the Technical Support team has checked and validated

- Limit maximum number of Recommendations to most recent 10 and provide a link to Recommendation Viewer if more

To me it makes sense to remove notifications once a user has set to "Snoozed", "Ignored" and certainly "Completed".

I've created a change request as placeholder already to get this on our roadmap, but would you be open to creating an Idea in this group to gather comments and votes from others about this request ?

Thanks!

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Peter,

for your information, I started receiving 18 Proactive information on November 11th.

The number decreased to 11 (eleven) on November 14th.

Between December 7th and January 10th I received 9 (nine) Proactive Information every day.

On the daily mail I received yesterday there wasn't any Proactive Information, while today they were again 9.

[PeterCase]

Hi Marco,

If you still have the emails, could you check the totals per product? Subscriptions to both Windchill and Creo would result in up to 20 notifications.

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Peter,

I received emails ONLY for Windchill, because it's since last May that I didn't have any new recommendation for Creo.

When we received these three recommendations we were using Creo 2 M160 and thanks to them we switched to build M210 between May and June.

Starting from that date, despite dozens of unexpected exit, we didn't get new recommendations for build M210.

Between the end of September and mid of November we switched to build M230 but, again, nothing new came from TS.

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Peter,

sorry if I reach you again, but after a couple of weeks I still receive recommendations for server that I'm not tracking again (you know the issue about rehosting and duplicating server ID).

Take a look at attached images.

The first is for recommendations of our Prod server

The second is for recommendations of our Test server

The third is for recommendations of our Dev server

The fourth are recommendations I got from tech support every day but, as you can see, non of them are about my three connected servers.

In the fifth and sixth image you can see that, in our recommendations list, those that came form TS are already completed and are nearly eight months that they no more occurred.

In the last image you can see that there are completed recommendations that still occurred in the last few days for which I haven't received a single alert from TS.

What do you think about it?

May I have to open a case?

TIA

[PeterCase]

Hi Marco,

Thank you for sharing these images, which clearly describe a disconnect you're seeing. I spoke with Jean-Christophe Coynel yesterday, who heads up Proactive and Digital Service Delivery, and he and his team would like to be involved in this conversation too.

I'll speak first to one issue that's on my radar, and is currently slated for a fix in our next major web release in April: "Do not send proactive notifications once a user has set to Snoozed, Ignored or Completed". This will at least improve the relevance of the alerts you receive, but as all 9 of the recommendations in your email screenshot are already completed (screenshots 5&6), this would mean that you would currently receive no alerts.

Reading through your post again, I'm understanding that your main concern is that you have followed articles linked to recommendations we sent to remedy some problems, you set them to completed, but the errors are still occuring.

I think our approach here should be twofold:

(1) Please do go ahead and open a case with Support to investigate why errors are still being sent after following the recommendation(s)

(2) I'd like to use this thread to open up a discussion with Jean-Christophe and any others who would like to participate as to what you would like to be alerted to.

          - Current alert algorithm: 10 most recent (TS-approved) recommendations per product

          - Proposed algorithm (April web release): 10 most recent approved where status <> Snoozed|Ignored|Completed

          - Your proposals ?

Lastly, I didn't miss the comment about duplicate UUIDs after a server is rehosted. I wasn't actually aware of this problem, and will involve the appropriate team to investigate and suggest either a best practice, or an update to our proactive tools to avoid unwanted or duplicate recommendations.

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Peter,

I'm sorry for the delaying in reply, but I've been home sick.

In the meantime something has changed for Windchill recommendations.

Yesterday there was a 10th new one (for Prod server) that I had immediately applied and, after that, the mail I received today from TS had the usual 9.

Yesterday there was a new recommendation also for Test server, but it wasn't in TS mail.

I could saw it only through GUI and so it seems that only recommendation for server marked as production are sent via mail. It is correct?

About duplicate UUIDs I'd like to inform you that, as you can see in attached image, I have three managed servers while in GUI they are still six (R&D delete the old three while I asked TS in this case https://support.ptc.com/apps/case_logger_viewer/auth/ssl/case=13182033).

I believe this is why I'm still receiving recommendations via mail even if I cannot track these three old servers.

I would not open a new case because tomorrow we will start our process migration to Windchill 11.0 M020 that should go in production by the end of April.

Another issue in the GUI appeared yesterday and it's in the second attached image.

Until last week CAD clients were 100% Creo while this week data in GUI changed even if we doesn't have any single client different from Creo.

Before giving you my suggest about how recommendations mail should be sent, may I ask you to explain in which way TS choose how many recommendations send to customers and when?

For me it is not very clear.

Talking about Creo, for example, I received three recommendations last year in May, that I applied with success, moving from build M160 to M210 and that solved some issue we have, but after that nothing more came from TS in the last eight months.

Finally i'd like to point you to another strange issue that appeared yesterday morning in the Creo dashboard.

As you can see below in my dashboard there are no more sessions in the relative gadget.

The same thing happens when I open the sessions gadget and I look in the first two tabs (summary and list), but If I look in by time or by platform tab, there my sessions are present.

[Jean-Christophe]

Hi Marco Tosin‌,

Thank you for taking the time to provide us all this valuable feedback.

Regarding the Creo recommendations, we have just created an article to document how the process work : https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS256159‌. Note that at the moment we are reveiweing this process overall, and as a result no recommendations on Creo stability are being generated. It is therefore normal that you do not receive any.

[Jean-Christophe]

Hi again, Marco Tosin‌,

I think that your issue with the session widget is the one we have reported as SPR 6414946 in this article : https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS000256280

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Jean-Christophe,

thanks for the update and also for the new article about Creo recommendations.

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Jean-Christophe,

I saw that article last week, but when it is intended to have a solution for this issue?

Working without sessions is a nightmare if you want to verify if users had any unexpected exit.

I have to go under machine gadget and then, using an Excel file in which I have machine UUID and user UID matched together (and in one case I have two UID for one UUID) trying to verify if someone had some crash.

Working that way it's useless and it cause me to spend double time, at least, to do the same work.

How was it possible, after more than a year and a half, that sessions gadgets disappeared?

And it is not the only regression.

For Example last week I installed our first Windchill 11 server, but I wasn't able to modify GUID name in Performance Advisor for Windchill.

Thanks for your attention.

[TomU]

Something is going on with Performance Advisor for Creo today:

[Jean-Christophe]

Hi Marco Tosin‌,

We are actually working on the above issue, please see https://community.ptc.com/t5/Performance-Advisor/Sessions-Gadget-and-Sessions-Page-now-blank/td-p/17962?et=watches.email.thread#478416

[Marco_Tosin]

It is since last Friday that support site is going that way once in a while.

[Marco_Tosin]

I had just wrote a comment in that discussion.

It seems that sessions were back.

Thanks

[TomU]

Are you seeing session data?  I'm just getting this:

[Marco_Tosin]

Sessions come and go.

One moment you can see it and few seconds later, if you refresh you page, you receive "Access denied" message.

[TomU]

See my comment here:  Re: Sessions Gadget and Sessions Page now blank