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bobg1-Visitor
1-Visitor
June 8, 2010
Question

Viewing a doc from WC without an account?

  • June 8, 2010
  • 16 replies
  • 6103 views

Is it possible to open a document for viewing from within WC (8.0) without having to log into an account? The reason I ask is that we store all of our business processes and QA documentation in WC and we’d like everyone to be able to access them as and when needed. (At the moment, duplicate files are stored on a (rather bad) intranet). However, the number of employees exceeds our licence count.

Can anyone recommend a solution to this delimma?

Many thanks

16 replies

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ddemay1-Visitor
1-Visitor
June 9, 2010
I heard this is prohibited and only makes auditing users accessing data using this custom means is non compliant. If you were to write the servlet to not use any IP owned by PTC i.e. SQL directly to Oracle...you might be okay?

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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sscole11-Visitor
1-Visitor
June 9, 2010

My suggestion is to talk to your PTC or VAR account manager about view/print licensing for "extended" internal users.

External licensing obviously doesn't apply to internal users (and, yes, this is auditable). I believe using a "virtual" account for access is in violation of the EULA and obviously does not support role/user-based access control nor the ability to track who has accessed information in the system. I think you will find more prevalence of view/print licensing since it is often sold inconjunction with the Windchill Web Parts for SharePoint module which is designed to proliferate data through the SharePoint environment (which is a terrific way to share valuable PLM data to "extended users" outside of core engineering).

There may be rules around heavy/light/qvp licensing ratios along with economies of scale considerations, so you really need to talk to your individual account manager...

Steve

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mreece1-Visitor
1-Visitor
June 9, 2010
Thank You Robert. Thousands of pounds to view our own documents.... Sums up the issue.



I think PTC has really missed the boat with the high cost of view/print licensing. They had the opportunity to get us to manage a large portion of our intellectual property within their tool, driving demand for Winchill and Product View licenses plus potentially more authoring tools. Instead we are forced to store this data in alternate locations so the masses can have access in a cost effective manner.



Even in a down economy Adobe is making millions of dollars giving their acrobat reader away free!


We are being forced to move from INTRALINK 3.x to Windchill. PTC has the ability to make this a positive or negative experience. So far they seem more concerned with grabbing money now than investing in the future of our relationship.


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jkent1-Visitor
1-Visitor
June 9, 2010
We have written a java app that queries the database to find the viewables for a particular epmdoc then copies from the vault to the local machine to open it.



Basically the user enters the epmdoc file name and the application goes out and finds what it needs then copies it the local machine.







I assume you could do this with other docs as well. Here is a screen shot of what the sql gives us. These are all the viewable files related to model_program_new.drw












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WayneBeck1-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 23, 2014

Could you share the complete sql code? I have an excel file that will let users query windchill but the user must login. This is not ideal due to cost.

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ejhlti1-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 24, 2014

may want to check out this thread:


http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/fo/st/topic=16&post=87264#p87264


Quite some time ago I played around with this and was able to retreive drawings published in windchill from a command line prompt. No windchill user interface needed.


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