I'm curious if anyone out there has a general strategy or methodology or even just a rule of thumb when it comes to upgrading. What I'm looking for in this discussion is:
How often do you upgrade Windchill (Not patches/interim releases, but rather the major releases)? Do you upgrade to every new major release? How long after initial release do you wait to upgrade? Do you do the same for your CAD systems (ie. Pro/E)? Why or why not?
We are currently on 9.1 M020 with WF3. We're likely going to upgrade Pro/E to WF5 first in the next few months and then upgrade to 10.0 a few months after that.
Our primary reason for upgrading in both cases is new usability enhancements.
As for a strategy, we currently don't follow one. Since we use a third party to perform upgrades for us, we generally push back on it because of the financial justification involved. However, with more and more users (nontechnical ones especially) using PDMLink here, I believe the usability of 10.0 will hopefully bring down internal WC support, training, and mentoring....hard to quantify this but still beneficial.
Mike -
