Document Management Integrations - Anyone Considering Office365?

[sm]

PTC recieves a fair amount of questions about providing an integration to Office365 lately. I'm curious if there's folks out there using Office365 now and what type of connectivity you'd like to have with Windchill?

To me, the main difference is the option to use the Microsoft Office Web Applications instead of the locally installed Office applications and the content has a high probability of residing in the O365 cloud, OneDrive or an on-premise SharePoint implementation. The Office Web Apps are only supported on SharePoint and cannot be directly integrated into a non-SharePoint solution.

It seems like a "Send to Windchill" option would be nice to have, but I'm curious if there are any other use cases or needs people might have?

-Scott

[DarrenStorey]

Scott,

Running multiple versions of multiple CAD apps we already have a battle sometimes with the compatibility matrix. This is what determines when we upgrade and what we upgrade to.

The main concern for us is not to compound this issue by adding compatibility of MS office into the mix. For us this means O365 support across a broad range of Windchill versions is much more important than broader O365 functionality supported on limited Windchill releases.

Regards

Darren

[cc-2]

Is there something Sharepoint can do that Windchill can't ?

I am for less systems the better and since Sharepoint can't handle CAD files, and Windchill can handle the files as Sharepoint does. My view is Sharepoint should be migrated to Windchill and sharepoint closed or kept for general blabla discussion which does not add value into the company knowledge work.

Also if you have Windchill on premise and you start using Office365 which is cloud based, that could breach some security policy, don't you think ?

Best regards

[ChrisPLM]

Hi Scott,

it does not seem that many people are interested in that discussion....

[BrianToussaint]

Scott,

Our IT department is looking at implementing this.  In my discussion with them, they think that it will not have any affect on Windchill.  If this is not the case, could you please let me know so I can talk with them.  They steamrolled Office 2013 through and are already talking about steamrolling Office 2016 through, which isn't even out.

Thanks,

Brian

[TomU]

Brian,

Right now there is no support for Office 365 (or Office 2016).  You can see the current support matrix here for Windchill 10.2 M030 (see page 24):

http://support.ptc.com/WCMS/files/156056/en/Windchill10.2M030SoftwareMatrices52015.pdf

The Windchill Future Platform Support document currently says that the next major release of Windchill (either 10.3 or 11.0 depending on who you ask) will still only support up through Office 2013.

According to CS130307, support will never be added for Office 365.

[BrianToussaint]

Tom,

They are saying that we can run in a Hybrid environment so that will not be a problem unless we upgrade to an unsupported version of Office.

[ChrisPLM]

Hi Brian

are your SharePoint and Windchill already integrated ?

If so can you please describe a bit ?

Thanks

[BrianToussaint]

Hi Chris,

No our Windchill and SharePoint are not integrated.  We use SharePoint for our corporate intranet.  We do put documents out there but more from a sharing standpoint.  We do have documents that we put in Windchill, but those have one of two purposes.  1. We have a workflow for approval signatures or 2. we are directly relating them to a workflow document or an end item/part.  There are a couple of instances where we have overlap because not everyone has access to Windchill.

Brian

[sm]

PTC fully supports Office365 as long as you have purchased a license that includes the local Office applications. If you have MS Office on your local machine, you can work with Windchill documents with or without Windchill Desktop Integration. If you only have access to the cloud version of the Office apps, you will not be able to work with Windchill as easily since these apps are geared at working with content in the Office365 vault.

To clear up the confusion on this issue, I have submitted the following requests:

• asked PTC Technical Support to update to their article on Office365
• asked R&D to update the Windchill Software Matrices document to include Office365
• asked R&D to add Microsoft Office 2016 to the Windchill Future Platform Support document

[sm]

You'll need to verify their licensing model. Many companies are going to Office365, but buying the license that includes local Office applications vs. cloud only. As long as you have access to local Office applications, you have full access to Windchill Desktop Integration and Windchill. Once the content files are uploaded and stored in the Office365 (SharePoint) cloud, the only Windchill integration is a URL Link Document. Not sure why everyone thinks Office365 and SharePoint are different from traditional ECM or DM solutions; once you've vaulted your files in another system, that is the system of record.

[dschenken]

If someone uses both Office365 cloud and Windchill, which one controls the workflow/approval system?

[sm]

Dave, that is the $$ question. For me, its whatever system you put it in. If your document is located in Office365 (OneDrive), Windchill has no knowledge of it, no access to it and therefore no way to control it. As a customer, you would be forced to use the workflow and approval controls in Office365. The opposite is true if we turn the tables. If the document is located in Windchill, Office365 will have no knowledge of it, no access to it and therefore no way to control it.

There are lots of companies out there with more than one PLM or ECM solution, or maybe one of each. Its a matter of how you decide to use them in tandem or allow one to supersede the other as Chris C‌ mentioned.

[GKelly]

Hi Scott,

I have a few questions:

• The latest support matrix doesn't show support for Office 2016 products, should it or will it?
  • Are there any known issues with Office 2016 and Windchill 10.2 M030 or Windchill 11?
• Why is Visio left off the list?  Is it still supported or will it continue to be supported?

Thanks,

-Gregg

[STEVEG]

Has anyone seen this?  I can't tell if this is possible from Windchill's out of the box functionality or if this company is the vendor that does it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nfd_JaGbJM&feature=youtu.be

[STEVEG]

As a guess I would say it's by that company.  But if they can do it that should be easy for PTC.

[JHall]

I know a person has to be careful using One Drive with Inventor WGM.  One drive's sharing can mess up PTC file system.

James

[imendiola]

Hi Steve,

yes, this is an "addon" that we have developed for Windchill, to allow viewing/editing office files stored in the system. You can get more information in the following link

https://prambanan-it.com/en/products/windchill-office-integration/

Regards