In the evolution of designs it sometimes is necessary to change authoring applications. A prime example is when you have legacy 2D autocad drawings and now you want to create a design change making the next drawing using Creo. Or if you acquire a company that uses a different 3D software and you intend to displace it by making any new iterations/design changes in Creo.
The only method today is to create a new/seperate EPMdocument. This creates 4 major problems:
- In the history there is none because the different authoring applications are treated as separate documents/history.
- When searching using wildcards as everyone does, it returns 2+ results instead of one because there are now 2+ latest files.
- If using WTParts a user must remember to delink and relink which our users fail to pay attention as they deal with changing CAD applications so infrequently.
- In a change notice the legacy document gets revised for those not paying attention. As a rule the WTPart and CAD must be revised together to not have the wrong version linked, however this process is an exception to that rule due to the legacy file needing to be left in the past.
As separate documents none of the workarounds to address these situations are good but we have no choice. User training only goes so far to prevent what an enterprise class PDM should be able to do.
My proposal is a mechanism like RMB convert authoring application. This would provide the option to check out and revise or iterate. Doing so would result in an accurate history and only 1 file returned in the search. The competing SolidWorks PDM Professional does this just fine. At this point I don't really even care how it is done, this is a must have function in Windchill.
