HUGE Creo Parametric Build and Maintenance Concern

[llie]

All,

We have a HUGE concern with the conflicting PTC stories. The maintenance for Creo Parametric 4 continues to Creo 7. We were told and showed that Creo Parametric 5 support only goes until the release of Creo 6.

The concern is when you look at the SPR list for Creo Parametric 4 M050 or M060, all the SPR's found in earlier versions of 4 states that they are fixed in Creo 5. They don't mention fixed in any future builds of 4.

Why would we go to 5 if you are going to discontinue the support when 6 comes. The we would be force from 6 when 7 comes out. 

[BenLoosli]

PTC has announced a different release process at the 2017 conference.

Since most of their major customers have stated that they only upgrade every 3 years, PTC now does their 'major' releases every 3 years, too.

Creo 4 was the last 'major' release. PTC has committed to do version releases once a year, just before the annual conference. So Creo 5 and Creo 6 are 'minor' releases, new functionality where needed, bug fixes and other enhancements. PTC will still provide update releases during each minor/major release. The next 3 year major release will be Creo 7 in the spring of 2020.

PTC should be providing patches were necessary to Creo 4, 5 & 6 up to and maybe a little beyond the release of Creo 7. I would expect that releases of Creo 4 builds will taper off over the years and some things fixed in Creo 5 & 6, may not be in creo 4 future releases.

At some point PTC has to say No More to certain releases and builds, this just makes sense from their internal development processes.

[TomU]

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PTC should be providing patches were necessary to Creo 4, 5 & 6 up to and maybe a little beyond the release of Creo 7.

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Not exactly.  The slides presented showed official support for Creo 5 ending a couple of months after Creo 6 gets released.  Likewise, official support for Creo 6 ends a couple of months after Creo 7 is released.  This means if you make the jump to 5 then you will also need to quickly jump to both 6 and 7 when they come out, if you want to stay on a supported platform.  (Since Creo is not backwards compatible there is no possibility to drop back to 4.)

It would be much better if each of the "small business" releases were fully supported until sometime after the next "enterprise release" comes out.  Then you could choose to upgrade to any one of them without automatically being forced to go to the subsequent ones as well.

[BenLoosli]

Product calendar shows Standard Support End Date for Creo 4, 5 (6 & 7) is TBD.

I see 3 builds of Creo 4 released/scheduled after Creo 5 was released.

I would expect this same pattern to continue even though Creo 4 to 5 was 15 months and not the planned future yearly March releases.

[TomU]

Updates will continue for Creo 4 all the way through the Creo 7 release since those are both enterprise releases.  The same is not true for Creo 5 and 6.  Those will only be updated/supported until the next release comes out.

[dgschaefer]

I believe the idea is that companies should commit to one of two strategies.

1 - Upgrade to each "enterprise" release, every 3 years.  Along the way you may choose to advance to newer builds to take advantage of bug fixes.  If a specific bug that is important to your enterprise is only available in an interim release, you may choose to move to it instead of waiting for the next enterprise release.  However, if that's the first of two interim releases, that may mean that you will be on an unsupported release for a year or so or move to the second interim release.

2 - Upgrade each year to capture new functionality and bug fixes.  More work to keep up to date each year, but you'll always have the latest bug fixes available.

Perhaps not a perfect situation, but not terrible either. It's predictable and you know what the impact of your decision to upgrade or not will be.  It's certainly an improvement over what PTC used to do. In the old system PTC would update the software when it felt like it and you didn't know if the next one was major or minor or if it would come in 12 months or 30.  You might pay your maintenance for 2 years with no new software updates.

[llie]

All,

Thank you for all the great information. We were planning on staying on 4 since it is an Enterprise release. I see where the issue lies in my question. If you look at the SPR Report with Creo 3 M160 as Current and Creo 4 M050 as Target the information is in correct.

Under the Resolved Issues tab it shows the build of Creo 4 where the fixes have been implemented, but under the Reported Issues tab almost all of them say Creo 5 5.0.0.0.

Then if you look into the CS# for each one they say things like Corrected in Creo Parametric 4.0 M020 or M030.

This is where my confusion was coming from and once again it is a PTC thing that is causing it.