Best practices for updating Creo date codes

[balmas]

Hi everyone -

I was wondering what procedures other people have in place for updating Creo date codes as they are released. Do you always stay one behind the most current? Or maybe more that one behind? Or maybe you always stay current with the latest release.

We have recently updated from WF4 to Creo 3 and would like to start using better habits when updating our software. Currently we are on date code m050 and I know right now the current is M090 so we're starting to fall behind.

Any information is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Brandon

This thread is inactive and closed by the PTC Community Management Team. If you would like to provide a reply and re-open this thread, please notify the moderator and reference the thread. You may also use "Start a topic" button to ask a new question. Please be sure to include what version of the PTC product you are using so another community member knowledgeable about your version may be able to assist.

[BenLoosli · Accepted solution]

A lot depends on what issues we have with the current running build. We also have to account for the version of Windchill that we use.

I am on Windchill 10.0 m040 with Creo 2 M100 and have no immediate plans to update to a newer build as we don't see any issues where we are.

If I need to update prior to Windchill 11.0, I will do that when I get into the final stages of the Windchill planning and testing. Once I get to Windchill 11.0, we will probably do an upgrade to Creo 3/4 depending on the timing.

I usually do not run Wildfire/Creo builds lower than m060 in production, so I have to look closely where those releases fall in the timeline.

[jherendeen]

We stay pretty up-to-date. There's always something pushing us forward. We update Windchill to support the latest CAD versions, and update Creo roughly every fourth maintenance release. We went from M050 to M090 last week to support Windows 10.

[bmüller]

How do you perform the upgrades?

e.g. M090 to M100

I have seen that there are Subfolders Mxxx in the Common files Folder, but the parametric and simulate folders have no shipcode in the path.

Do files change only in the common files folder between shipcodes?

My Idea would be to deploy new creo shipcode to all clients over the week.

After everybody has received the new Version I can change the shipcode for the shortcuts globally.

[TomU]

A quick comparison shows that the files inside the parametric folder do indeed change between builds.

Almost all of our users run Creo from a read-only network location, so in our case I simply install the newer build on the server, add our configurations, and then change the path in our startup script to point to the new build.  If we have any issues I can easily change the script back to any earlier build and the users won't even know it happened.

[balmas]

Tom,

How many users do you support in your organization with this method? One of the challenges we face is finding an efficient way of upgrading builds on each local users machine.

How were you able to configure Creo to run on local machines from the server?

[TomU]

We have around 20 Creo Parametric users.  We only use the "run from the network" approach on workstations.  With this approach, the only local installations are the Creo Thumbnail Viewer and Creo View (for use with Windchill.)  If someone has a laptop then we still manually install Creo locally.  The number of laptop users is small enough to not justify any type of automatic group-policy driven automated deployment.

For the "how" I'm going to point you to my previous comment here: https://www.ptcusercommunity.com/polls/1774#comment-20712

[bmüller]

hm sounds good. how can they use creo on business trips? additional local copy?

we have a 3rd Party Management Tool but I'll suggest this method for the Creo 3.0.

[TomU]

In order to run offsite you would need to either install Creo locally (what we currently do for laptops) or possibly configure offline files to cache the Creo loadpoint from the read-only network drive so it's available when disconnected from the network (I haven't tried this...)

[BenLoosli]

I use a network install location for Creo. I did a Creo 2 m100 to m220 upgrade last week.

I logged onto the server where I do all my installs from and removed Creo 2 m100, then installed m220. It went into the same folder structure, so all of the user's shortcuts still worked with no changes.

Simple upgrade, everyone on the same build the next day.

Don't have any laptop users here, but when I did have them, we loaded Creo locally on laptops. When in the office, they connected to the serevr for their license. When they travelled, they would borrow a license while gone. We did have a few that travelled a lot, so we split a single license off and gave them a dedicated license.