How can I prevent exporting from within the CREO ?

[emrecan]

Hello, we are using Creo with windchill. For this reason, I want to prevent users from exporting data from creo. I want to remove all export options and save as option. How can I do that. Thanks in advance for all the help

[Chris3]

I am pretty sure this is not possible. Even if it was there are valid reasons for needing to back up work offline. For instance if you want to leap frog from an old iteration to a new one you can pull down the old iteration, back it up, check out the latest iteration and then open up the old iteration from the backup and save over the top of the former "newest" iteration.

Backing up is also sometimes necessary to remove lingering external references.

[MartinHanak]

Hi,

please provide the exact reasons why you want to do this. If you want to prevent data theft, then the only possible solution is probably to virtualize workstations with Creo installation.

[Chris3]

Setting aside not trusting your employees, if someone really wants to steal CAD Models and they have the ability to check data in and out disabling the save as and backup is not going to prevent that. Creo downloads the models into a workspace. Anyone can go in and change the sid and lid files back to prt and assembly files just using windows explorer.

Not to mention that UI customizations can be over written by the user.

[emrecan]

Not to prevent data theft. We have the necessary measures for this. Our goal here is to prevent working outside of Windchill. We work with around 150 designers and they work from 3 different locations. We can track everything done via Windchill, but some users work outside of Windchill and upload the latest version of data to Windchill. For this reason, I only want users to save data in windchil. When they want to save the data outside of windchill, my technical team will support it. @MartinHanak  @Chris3 

[Chris3]

Aside from the check out and revise, every other option in the file menu is not customizable with the ui file. Even if you did remove the save as or backup, users could still work in their local workspace and not check files in.

If you want to enforce users using Windchill a better route may be a Windchill report that lists users that have not had any check in activity in X number of days. Then you can follow up with them to ensure that they are toeing the company line. You may need to cross reference that report with a list of CAD users because I guessing not all of your Windchill users are CAD users.

[emrecan]

Thanks for all the suggestions, but now what I want is to remove the save as button from users. Does anyone know how to do this? I also have the toolkit license.

@MartinHanak , @khimani_mohiki , @Chris3 

[Chris3]

Confirmed it is not possible:

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS226910 

https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS144052 

[emrecan]

I think it's possible with the Toolkit license.

[khimani_mohiki]

One solution I have seen which will help but not eliminate is to limit where data can be saved on the PC and how long it is retained until it gets deleted. So for example, you can only save to "c:\creo_temp" but that folder gets wiped every 24 hours, this doesnt eliminate the issue of saving to network drives. I think your problem is more business culture than technical, personally I would start with a reminder to the managers / Team Leaders about best practise and why its important to save into Windchill, maybe back that up with audits of locally saved CAD data (you could use a start up script to gather the data) to show team by team who is not following best practise.