Presentation Layer for Windchill managed Documents

[kpritchard]

Idea is to have a Web Layer to which Windchill Managed Content could be published.  This could be Dynamic Document (Arbortext) or WTDocuments.

Benefit/Business Case is to be able to leverage Windhchill to store and manage the source content, but enable an intranet like view of the content (in fact this presentation layer could potentially displace intranets, SharePoint etc. - at least partially).  Would allow Customers to have revision Controlled and Change Managed Administrative Documents such as SOP's etc. and consolidate to a single Change process for simplicity.

Let's be honest, if you were to ask all employees to access a WTDocument and download/open it's not going to happen.  Problem is that any applications that do have a more user accessible front end don't have very good data management capabilities. 

[mdebower]

So Keir,  would I be able to publish PDFs of drawings as secondary content and have them available to "casual" users by this method?

-marc

CAD / PLM Systems Manager

[kpritchard]

I wasn't thinking Drawings... I find that the PDF of drawing as visualization of a CAD Drawing is too deeply layered to be accessible by non Engineering users.  I'm also fairly "old school" in that I do not see the paper equivalent Drawing being completely displaced by a model only definition.  But that's another conversation.

I was thinking about Documents like Standards, Procedures, How To's etc.  The Documents that are typically not Change Managed or Revision Controlled as stored on company intranets, SharePoint Sites. etc.  I think this may have, at least in part been the intent of SharePoint Web Parts for Windchill but I'm not sure if that still has legs.  I know the cost of the Microsoft side of things to make it work was prohibitive.

An Organization's Administrative Documents are usually quite interdependent.  If you think about how to implement a Change to a Procedure, why would you not implement the same way as implementing a Product Change?  I just did a small version of this where a new methodology was rolled out... I had a hard time referencing all of the affected content that needed to change, as well as challenges in tracking completing and timing the "go live" (Effectivity).

The idea submission is centered around this, but there could be other applications as well.   

[sm]

Keir, awesome idea. I have been an advocate for this type of feature for a long time. Windchill is a great solution for vaulting content. The problem is getting it out.

The only way to access Windchill content is by knowing where it's located in the file system/folder heirarchy or becoming a Windchill search ninja. For most users, this will never happen.

When you have information consumers, it would be really nice to have this type of presentation layer, or document portal, giving them a quick and easy way to find documents for a specific project, product or library.

These users are not concerned with the development and management processes for these items, they just want access to the content. Adding a modern and intuitive document portal as the primary access point for guest or read-only users would really make things easier for the extended enterprise.

In fact, I would suggest having two views of this portal; one for published content and one for source content depending on your access rights that could be controlled with std Windchill security and access control.

[mdebower]

I agree it is an awesome idea.   I really hope that something along these lines gets adopted.  My boss told me the other day, "We have been feeding this monster (Windchill) for 7 years, it is time to get something out of it."  Having a document portal / presentation layer for quick and easy access would be imperative.

[BenPerry]

There is a lot of good discussion on this topic.  I can buy into the idea, although I can't fully visualize the outcome.

This is what I had in mind.  Tell me if this is way off-topic or not.

There are objects stored in Windchill that reside in the VAULT.  Somewhere, there would be a link (perhaps in the Actions drop-down menu?) that says something like "View Online".  Clicking on that link would open the source document in a frame in the browser.

The idea I have in my mind is a duplication of those "View Online" features in online email programs such as outlook.com or gmail.com.

My use case is a particular soft type of WTDocument that we use to document engineering testing requests & reports.  The primary content of the WTDoc is the test report.  The secondary content (that is found in the Attachments table of the WTDoc on the information page) is pictures, videos, Excel test log files, perhaps scanned PDFs of hand calculations, etc.  It would be beautiful if I could click on those objects in the Attachments table instead of downloading it or going to the information page of the secondary content.

Can you understand what I'm visualizing?  Does that fit into this idea?

[kpritchard]

Ben - I think the idea splits at viewing secondary content.  I like the idea of a more user friendly means of viewing attachments but I was thinking more in terms of the primary content.

The other difference was that I am looking for a presentation that mimicks a corprate intranet and the user does not need to enter the Windchill environment.  (PTC - I think you could make this an add on module with site licensing based on company size, number of employees etc. as it is an opportunity for these companies to reduce the overhead of implementing a presentation system such as Sharepoint while increasing data integrity and control)

[ChrisPLM]

Hi Keir

we faced similar situation back in 2008. PTC wanted to charge us for Print&View licences.

We ended up buying a third party software which would monitor windchill (document type (including 2D proe drawing), state, location) and create a pdf outside of Windchill into a windows folder.  This software could also delete the pdf if the Windchill data became obsolete for instance.

As we did not want users to access the pdf directly from windows explorer we created a basic HTML interface. You just entered the document number and the pdf opened.

Nonetheless I support your idea. This would have saved me time and money in the past