Forcing users to upgrade to Creo 4

[tjerome]

Hi

we have 184 license users of Creo in my organization. We are currently going through the process of upgrading from Creo 3 M150 to Creo 4 M100. A question was asked how do you force people to upgrade if they are taking too long to do the upgrade and holding the rest back? Is there a way to make to block  Creo 3 licenses? We use a flexlm server to manage the floating licenses for the Creo products. It seems though if you have a Creo 4 or 5 license , they are backwards compatible with older versions, as far as flexlm is concerned. What are your thoughts or what has worked for your in your org?

[BenLoosli]

We put the image on a server. One upgrade and everyone has it the next day.

Worked one company where we did local installs, over 250 workstations! Never again.

At another company when we did it local, but only 45 workstations, was to do the manufacturing people first, then work back down the user list to design engineering. Those who only read the data or create their own from existing data were done first. Data authors, designers, were done last.

[tjerome]

We attempted a network install from a server but ran into too many problems with our enterprise security and permissions and group permissions, so we fell back to doing a full client.Are you concerned with a single point of failure with the server image?

[BenLoosli]

Single point of failure might be more of a concern if I had more users, only 14 licenses., split between 2 independent systems.

If one of the file servers went down, it would take out a lot more than just Creo, so IT would be on the stick to get everything back up. My Windchill systems would still be up as they don't run on the corporate file system. I have 5 Windchill pairs (Windchill and Oracle servers) so data would still be protected.

Depending on how long IT estimated any rebuild would take, it would be easy to do something local if needed.

[bmüller]

Hi,

we distribute Creo by SCCM. 100 Clients in EMEA and US. rollout 1-2 days.

China is done by local IT. 300 Clients. they decided it's easier to walk over to every client... but they really finished in one week. Manpower 😄

br Bernhard

[tjerome]

bmuller

how did you do the inputs or automate the client installs, or ar eyou saying you just let SCCM deliver the install package and let the user do the actual installation? We have SCCM here in our enterprise as well, but it does mostly microsoft patching.

[bmüller]

we deploy Creo 4 by copying a Master setup to all clients. Install Creo on a client and copy the install folder C:\PTC\... to all others.

To prevent users needing admin rights on the first run, we deploy PTC Creo Platform Services 4.0, Diagnotic Tools / Quality Agent, Creo Thumbnail Viewer 4.0.

And Creo View we deploy anyway.

This is perfect if all Clients have the same settings.

If you have different License Servers and features it's a little bit tricky, as you have to replace it in some files.

In SCCM I have a Creo base deployment with a default creo and per region one deployment which updates license config. (all in one App)

And the client is not aware of his Creo setup. Other tools (e.g. Moldex 3D) will not find it.

For Creo 6 I tested the silent setup from Creo and plan to use this for Creo 7. It's faster and easier to prepare and clients know about Creo.

Basically you install it again on a master client. But you just copy some xml-config files and feed it to the setup on the client. As you can skip license config (since Creo 4/5?!) you do not have to modify any config files in advance.

I added our setup script. Maybe it helps. But there is a deployment guide from PTC too.

We do not use the central Server setup, as our employees travel a lot to China with bad connections.

br Bernhard