What-if design studies with Projectlink?

[ptc-1221945]

Hoping someone can shed some light on this for me. We are currently using Windchill PDMlink 9.1 but have not yet started using Projectlink. There are some users here who think that projectlink would give users the ability to shareCAD data outside of the commonspace database.

In other words, if one user was working on some what-if modeling scenarios, he/she could share his/her design progress with another user in the project, but without actually checking the work back into the commonspace for the rest of the engineering group to see. Does anyone know if projectlink has this functionality, or have some suggestion for achieving the same thing?PTC's projectlink brochures aren't clear about this. Thanks,

-Randy

[JoshuaHouser]

Hi Randy,

It's nice to see somebody else come up with this one! That's an idea
we've been tossing around here as well.



Basically check files out from commonspace (Products) to a Project. Now
invite user to the project that you want to collaborate with. The
Project owner can set rights for users of that project to add or delete
iterations within that project. Once everybody's happy, the latest
iteration can be "Sent to PDM" to iterate the commonspace documents.



The only thing that may be annoying are the different iteration
sequences in ProjectLink. It's basically just adding another ".x" so
that a ProjectLink document has it's own iteration sequence.

[vmcdaniel]

I believe this is one of the entire intents of ProjectLink. I plan on incorporating the same type of thing when we get a few months down the WC road from GoLive. Here's a document from PTC on PDM-Prj interoperability.

[JoshuaHouser]

Hi Vaughn,

You make a good point. Perhaps I have had a bit of tunnel-vision. My
premise has always been that ProjectLink was expected to be used as a
collaboration area with outside vendors, or as a place to start a new
project. I don't recall ever paying attention to the first page of the
"Integral Operations..." document that states the premise that
ProjectLink facilitates "Exploration of design options in an engineering
Sandbox".



In Pro/Intralink, we have folders where users have full rights to
rename, delete, etc. We wanted the same functionality in Windchill but
were torn how to do this. ProjectLink offers all the "Sandbox"
functionality we had with our former Intralink folders, with the added
ability of making a user the owner of the project and inviting others to
collaborate. So...not only can a user create "what-if-scenarios", that
user can also add others to the project, route documents for approval,
delete stuff, rename stuff and basically anything as long as it's not in
PDMLink.



We had one stipulation for fear of uncontrolled growth of vault sizes,
and that is that each user gets one Project designated as a sandbox that
he or she has complete control of. It does mean that the user can put a
huge amount of data in that one Project, but at least it's not huge
amounts of data across randomly user-created projects.

[vmcdaniel]

Hi Josh,
It's funny how perceptions of software use differ. My PTC VAR had no vision of using PDM Proj in this mannor.
For some reason I've always had the idea in my head that ProjectLink was for the 'sandbox' scenario. I think the PDM<->Proj share/send to will work great for us, and most.
We were/are doing the same in Intralink, users created in 'project' folders, but could not Release anything until it was moved to a 'Product' folder. However I designed that system based on the perceptions I have with the PDM<->Proj interoperability.

Vaughn