Windchill Tips

We  are excited to be working closely with our PTC Gold Partner, Anark, on Supplier Collaboration.  Anark, whose Core software allows PTC customers to transform their engineering design, manufacturing, and maintenance information into advanced technical content and digital workflows, has posted a number of useful blogs on supply chain collaboration and cybersecurity.        In 'Supply Chain Collaboration: Top Five Strategies', Anark CEO Scott Williams challenges readers to stop doing the same things with supply chain collaboration and become more agile and responsive -  but how, with so many suppliers in the value chain?   To learn how, read 'Supply Chain Collaboration: Top Five Strategies'.

The Registration Link is live:  https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/plm/webcast/tech-tips-navigate-9   Learn more about this webcast on November 19th at 10 am EST:   What if manufacturing had all the right data at the right time? With increased visibility through ThingWorx Navigate, engineering and manufacturing can work concurrently and close the gap, helping customers get to market faster.   Increasing visibility to enterprise data helps save time, reduce costs, and improves quality.  In this session, you will hear about enterprise collaboration & how Navigate’s product strategy is value driven.    In our next Tech Tips webcast, "Enterprise Collaboration with Thingworx Navigate,"  we will walk you through the power of reusable components - released in Navigate 9.0 - via a production planner persona demo.  We will also deep dive into the new capabilities included in the upcoming 9.1 release.      Explore the value Navigate can bring to your implementation to drive your Digital Transformation! Share this with your colleagues!    

Our own GM, Kevin O’Brien, will be one of the sponsored speakers for this upcoming virtual Product Innovation (PI) Digital Transformation (Dx) event, which spans such themes as Digital Product Design and Development, PLM, Digital Manufacturing, Data Integration, and more.     To learn more about PI DX and to review their agenda,  visit https://events.pi.tv/2020/dx/agenda

  The /Windchill/tmp/wrmfTransport directory get deleted randomly. Tried to exclude that folder from antivirus analysis but in vain. Can someone help on this please?    

Example of using Part Compare with and showing how Show Only Differences works   (view in My Videos)

  Have you had a chance to learn about PTC Navigate yet? Did you know that PTC Navigate provides universal data access? Any stakeholder in the product’s lifecycle can access the latest, most accurate product information to drive better product decisions – with a user experience that is as simple and straightforward as the average smartphone app.   Join us on Tuesday, October 25th, at 1:00pm EST for the live webcast, “PTC Navigate: Easy Access to Enterprise Product Data”, to see a demonstration of how intuitive and easy to use PTC Navigate role-based apps are to: View documents. View drawings. View requirements. View part properties. View parts lists. View part structures. View design files. View and measure in 3D.   Don’t miss this opportunity for a live Q&A with PTC Experts, Chris Bergquist, Senior Solutions Director, PLM, and Steve Partridge, Director Solutions Management. REGISTER NOW   Are you already a customer using Windchill 10.2 or higher? If so, you can take advantage of PTC Navigate apps immediately. There's no need to upgrade your existing Windchill deployment. Dramatically expand the value of PLM information across the roles in your company TODAY! Contact us to learn more

I will provide simple troubleshooting techniques that will assist you in identifying potential access related issues in your Windchill system.  Have you ever wondered: Why am I facing a NotAuthorizedException? Why are some Windchill objects not findable or accessible for me even I think I am having appropriate access permissions? Let’s get started.   Understanding Domains and Access Control   Windchill system behavior is based on a context or container model. The site context represents the system as a whole, whereas an Organization is a component of the Site and Products, Libraries, Projects and Programs are part of the Organization. Each of these contexts uses a cabinet to store data and system objects. Cabinets are associated with Windchill objects called Domain which store policies and access rules.   The chart below illustrates the default Domain Architecture; for a more detailed description please view article CS212423 in our PTC Support Knowledge Base.     Domain structuring in conjunction with inheritance enables general policies to be applied at higher domains and more specific policies to be applied at a lower level.   When debugging Access Control you not only have to consider inherited policies from higher contexts, but also keep in mind how Windchill will evaluate Security Labels, Access Permissions on Groups and individuals as well as Ad-Hoc Permissions. The following algorithm is generally applied:   Security Labels: Windchill will always check first if a user gets cleared by Security Labels System Policy Rules apply in the following order: Group Grant is overridden by Group Deny is overridden by User Grant is overridden by User Deny is overridden by Group and User Absolute Deny Ad-Hoc Rules: Ad-Hoc access can only grant permissions Ad-Hoc overrides a deny rule that is set by domain policy but not an absolute deny.   If you are interested in more details, please check in the Windchill Help Center in chapter “How ACLs work:” there you will find additional examples for a better understanding.   Debugging Access Control Issues   Now that you have a clear understanding on how Windchill calculates access permissions, I will concentrate troubleshooting ACL related issue. In Technical Support, most cases that are opened by customers fall into three categories:   Users can’t open an object or perform a specific action which results in Access Permission related error messages Users can’t find object in their Windchill System by Search or they are not visible to them Dedicated actions are not visible in the Windchill User interface for some users   We will concentrate in this post on the first category.   Troubleshooting Access Permission related error messages   Access related error messages come in many flavors. See below the most common ones that show up in the Windchill user interface or in the Method Server logs:     If you see one of these error messages, it is the time when you have to answer the question: Is this intentional or should this user have access to the object? To help you answer this question PTC provides you help with 3 tools:   Manage Security functionality in the Actions menu: Refer to Windchill Help Center chapter Manage Security for an Existing Object for additional information Policy Administrator on Site > Utilities > Policy Administrator or [Context] >Utilities > Policy Administrator: For additional information please refer to article CS26785 - How to troubleshoot the message "You do not have access to this object or it does not exist" in Windchill‌ Various Access loggers that help to understand how Windchill calculated the Access Permission and why this particular user was denied access: Technical Support prepared a set of articles that explain the various loggers available and helps to understand their results: The Hub article CS78689 - How to investigate Policy Access Control issues in Windchill CS78878 - The differences between the various Access Control related Loggers in Windchill CS78846‌ - How to interpret verbose Policy Access related log entries in Windchill   Thanks for your attention and any questions or feedback is welcome.

PTC is happy to announce the new HTML5 based drag-n-drop file upload utility with Windchill 10.2_M020. This new utility will replace the existing Java based drop target and give people a much simpler and more intuitive way to upload new documents and attachments. This video demonstrates how easy it is to create a single document and its associated attachments using the new drag-n-drop upload utility on MacOS with Safari.   This video does not contain audio.     Unable to play video. Please try again later. (view in My Videos)

This is a quick video showing how easy it is to use the built in drag-n-drop features of Firefox and Chrome to upload files in Windchill. This video demonstrates how to create both a single document or mulitple documents using simple drag-n-drop operations.     (view in My Videos)

This Rehosting Utility demo focuses on rehosting a CentOS based Windchill 10.1 clustered environment to another cluster. It also discusses some handy shortcuts that can be used when rehosting clusters to reduce the runtime of the utility.     (view in My Videos)