Have 5 minutes? Please take our Windchill Publications Survey!

[KimberlyMoroni]

Hello!

The Windchill Publications team has created this 5-minute survey to help identify areas of focus for future documentation usability evaluations. We are seeking feedback from Windchill administrators and users, whether or not you use the PTC-provided documentation. To take the survey, please go to:

[davehaigh]

I don't know about the rest of you on the mail exploder, but if you are like me and you actually read the pdf documents, I suggest you respond to this survey. You should indicate in the comments that you actually use the pdf documents.

Based on the content of the survey, and the fact the Creo Parametric has done away with the entire help topic collection of pdf's, my guess is that PTC would like to do the same for Windchill.

My issue with the on-line help is you can't print out a chapter and take it with you to read off-line. Which is something I do over lunch quite often. It's also difficult to hi-lite and add comments. Also because the on-line documentation is not formatted like a book there is no logical flow so it's easy to miss that this item here is related to that item there.

Earlier this year downloaded a pdf reader app with markups capability to my iPad. I then added all the ProE, Windchill 9.1, & 10.0 pdf's to it. I still don't find it as good as a printed hard copy, but it takes up a lot less space.

Maybe I just old-school and can't get with the new program. But I'll take a book over on-line documentation any day.

David Haigh

[BenLoosli]

One concern I have with online documentation is if PTC is trying to host it on their servers and expect everyone to have access to the files. A lot of us work in a secured environment and have no access to PTC.com from the main Windchill/Creo computers. I do have 2 computers on my desk so I can get to both sides of the security wall.

Thank you,

Ben H. Loosli
USEC, INC.

[jzupfer]

Hi, David,

I'm another old-schooler, and I rely on hard-copy documentation for many things. We're not planning to stop producing PDF versions of our Windchill documentation, as we know that a number of our customers rely on it; because we author our content in XML, we can easily produce multiple output formats from the same source files. Additionally, writers profile the content so as to ensure that it retains a meaningful flow in PDF (book) form, while allowing users to access concise content from a specific location in the UI.

If you are using Windchill 10.0 M010 or a later release, you can also create PDF/printable versions of specific topics yourself, from the Help Center table of contents. You simply select a topic and click the Print TOC icon; the topic you selected and all of its child topics will be concatenated and ready to send to a printer, with the appropriate topic hierarchy retained and denoted by indentation. If you have a printer with the appropriate driver, you can also save the file to PDF and then print it.

The purpose of our survey is to get a better understanding of our user constituency; I'm not expecting to use the responses to drive any changes to our current practice of providing PDF versions of our documentation. As a follow-up to the survey, we want to do some specific usability testing to validate our Help Center design and functionality with users.

Finally, I'd also like to encourage those of you on the exploder list to please take 5 minutes and respond to our survey--we really want your feedback!

Thanks and regards,
Jane

Jane Zupfer
VP, Windchill Publications
PTC
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[jzupfer]

Hello, Ben,

Although we do make the Windchill Help Center available on ptc.com, it will remain an application that is installed on your Windchill server when you install the product. All context-sensitive links in the product UI are directed toward that installed instance.

Regards,
Jane

Jane Zupfer
VP, Windchill Publications
PTC
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[RonThellen]

Jane,

Thanks for the clarification. I completed the survey, but wanted to add a comment here as well.

Our company uses Pro/INTRALINK (currently 9.1). My biggest frustration with the documentation (and training material) is that the Pro/INTRALINK documentation isn't Pro/INTRALINK specific. It appears that it is simply the PDMLink documentation sprinkled with a few Pro/INTRALINK references. As we began work on building our Pro/INTRALINK 9 environment and further during our Pro/INTRALINK 3.4 migration, I found many instances where the Pro/INTRALINK documentation referenced features that were only available in PDMLink. In the early stages of building our Pro/INTRALINK 9.1 environment I wasted many hours investigating features that in the end were not available in Pro/INTRALINK, even though they were included in the Pro/INTRALINK documentation.

My request is:
- Make the Pro/INTRALINK documentation Pro/INTRALINK specific. Don't include items that are only applicable in PDMLink.
- In the online help include an "Applicability" indicator of some sort that states something like "Available in PDMLink, ProjectLink and Pro/INTRALINK" or "Available in PDMLink and ProjectLink only."

Thanks,

Ron Thellen
CAD Administrator
Engineering & Manufacturing Applications
Government Communications Systems Division
Harris Corporation
321-729-7502

[pperry]

On-line is nice when it works (and as Ben has stated) or when you can get to it. I just tried the link to the survey and have been told it no longer exists or it is down. If I am looking for help, that is not the answer I want.

Patrick Perry -- BAE Systems

[KimberlyMoroni]

Hi Pat,
I'm not sure what is wrong with the survey. When I access it, the survey says it is still "open". I've reset a setting - could you please retry for me and let me know.
Thanks!
Kim

[egifford]

I was getting an error as well when trying to access the survey through the link. Remove the period that is at the end and it will work.

Erik