Windchill Best Practices, Tips & Tricks

[ptc-293895]

Gurus,



I am looking to jumpstart a Best Practices, Do's and Do Not's and Tips &
Tricks for basic Windchill User functions. It seems on the surface and
through training that some basic operations should be simple, but have
not proved to be so. For example, to bump a revision on a part (A to
B), my users cannot simply bump the rev on a modified part in a
workspace. You have to basically create a rev of the part in
commonspace, then check it out, then modify it and check it in. Well,
who knows every part in an assembly that is going to change during a
design modification? Anyway, it has become a dance of exporting the
changed parts, clearing the workspace of those parts, making the
revision in Commonspace, then checking it out and overwriting
it..........there has got to be a better way or maybe not. I told them
they could just check it in, then create the revision, but then the
latest A.# revision would have been checked in with B revision
information in the titleblock???



Anyway, anybody who has collected some best practices and would like to
share them, I would be more than happy to share the list as it is
developed.



We are running PDMLink 9.1.



Thanks,



David M. Robers

Vice-president of Sales



Diversified Design Dynamics

6039 Schumacher Park Drive


West Chester, OH 45069

[MikeLockwood]

Phrases below are a symptom of thinkin in Intralink 3.x terms instead of PDMLink terms...

We have laboriously created all of this over the past 5 years just as you propose; a large part of the effort has been to re-think concepts in terms of how PDMLink works instead of how Intralink 3.x works.

We'll be fully participating in PTC's new "community online forum" which will hope to collect, organize and make this sort of thing available to all. Please contact Daniel, copied here for more info if interested.

Re note below:
- Revise in Windchill is a fundamentally different concept for working than "Modify Revision" in Intralink 3.x. Just need to get used to it in order to productively use the system.
- As of 9.0 you can Revise in the Workspace as part of conceptual work - and potentially never check the new Revision in; up until 9.0 you're stuck with Revising in "commonspace." It's useful to diagram out what happens to the data after each user action in Intralink 3.x and compare to similar in PDMLink.
- Need to pay close attention to this especially for family tables by the way.

[ptc-113113]

Hi Dave,

The expert advice we have been receive from the PTC/USER community is to use the "Continue" option in Pro/E

Create one or more workspaces. Check out the the assembly to the first workspace, Modify the assembly to your hearts content in any or all of the other workspaces. Modified objects in a workspace that are not checked out are "inelidgible for upload". Decide which alternative you are going to check in, if it is in the first workspace, check it in. If it is in any of the other workspaces, undo check out from the first workspace, then check out without overriding content in the other workspace. Then check in from the other workspace. A better tango than the import export dance. Your data never leaves the workspace, and you always know what your state is when compared with the commonspace.

Downside is, yes you have to backup the local cache, I think it a small price to pay to acheiveautomatic tracking of modified objects