Sharing of customised views created by a user to other users.

[NA_9341349]

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders.

Working as an engineering support to multiple projects working within Windchill.

2. What version of Windchill are you currently running?
Windchill 11.1

3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.
Views within containers can only be made available to other users if it has been created by an Administrator within the tool and the check box "Share with all users" has been checked. This creates a global view for all users to be able to find and use in their view. Users are able to create their own custom view but will only be available to them and cannot be shared. In order for other users to have the same custom view they will have to recreate the view or an Administrator has to create it and share with all. However, because we manage many different programs, users want project specific views they can share with users in their containers only.

4. What is the use case for your organization?
By having a share with users functionality with custom views created by a user, they would be able to create and share views that would be valuable to people within their teams/projects.

5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?
This would increase user efficiency in the tool and reduce the amount of rework that is required to recreated views between all users who want the same view.

[olivierlp]

Hi @NA_9341349 and Welcome to the PTC Community!

Thank you for your idea and the information provided.

[BrianToussaint]

It would be more beneficial if admins had access to a user's views and could share/tweak.  Otherwise this could be a nightmare for admins.  Currently a user can export the view and then an admin can import and share the view, which would stop the "recreation".  I have not tried it but the "how to" is found in cs174468 .

The downside to this would be for large installations.  Let's say you have 150 users and half of them do this and share 2 each.  Now you have 150 views in the dropdown.  Being an admin of Creo and various PTC PDM systems over the years, something like this scenario would not surprise me.

Another scenario would be that users couldn't modify another users view and they want a small tweak so they do a save as, tweak and share.  So now you have two very similar ones.

[NA_9341349]

Thanks for the information @BrianToussaint, as you've said the biggest issue with this approach is the exponential increase in Global views if a system with around 400 users and half of them want to share a view, there would be 200+ views for everyone to navigate between. We currently have around 20 global views and even now users are being overwhelmed not including their own custom views.

A ideal implementation would be as follows:

1. User creates a custom view
2. There is an extra step in this window which includes users who can also see and use this view.
3. Only the author and Admin are able to edit the view.
   1. Maybe there would be another location to a users created views as to not overwhelm admin users.