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22-Sapphire I
MikeLockwood22-Sapphire I
22-Sapphire I
February 13, 2014
Question

[Windchill] - Why is Windchill Administration so cryptic!

  • February 13, 2014
  • 18 replies
  • 5083 views
Over the past 9 years my team and I have gradually prepared exactly this ā€“ itā€™s currently spread out in about 600 Word docā€™s, PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, and Visio Diagrams on a network drive available to our team, along with zillions of notes spread thru descriptions of reports, preferences, etc. Diagrams and ā€œcheat sheetsā€ provided to users have made huge difference in our success. Maybe all this could be compiled and made available somehow ā˜ŗ

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There are very large number of decisions that need to be made in order to use the system in the optimum way for each particular business. MANY of the default configurations and settings need to be changed. Itā€™s definitely challenging to document what youā€™ve decided to do, then configure the system to match, then test to confirm - ongoing. These decisions affect many peopleā€™s daily work in a major way. Many are tough to change after they are in use.

The documentation feels like itā€™s addressing a bizarre and strange world to those of us who came to PLM from Engineering and CAD admin. Likely the CAD side of things feels that way for those who come from an IT operations background.


Note: We have had quite good experience with tech support in general ā€“ but success is highly dependent on phrasing the questions and supplying a lot of screen captures.

    18 replies

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    K
    kimndave91-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    February 14, 2014

    I looked at ezcollab and wondered why create another support site? PTCUser and the PTC Communities site already cover the need well; as, to a lesser extent,does Eng-Tips and probably dozens of others.


    Getting answers to questions on a particular topic does not improve with an increased number of places to ask because it justleaves the number of people who can answer less likely to find and respond while increasing the chances of getting poor answers.


    It does bring to mind a great anti-company strategy. Create so many support websites for a product that infrequent or new users can't find the useful ones and assume the product is poorly supported by a community.

    A
    ascorupco1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    February 14, 2014

    WC Documentation sucks! When I'm calling PTC support to help resolve sometimes simple issues on our Linux / clustered instance: ohhh we do not have clustered image availabe, ohhh we do not use Linux version as our test instaces, frustration was beyond any possible levels.....


    BUT hello! let's not finish this week in pesimistic way, 10.3 will be a LOT BETTER!! - I do not have ANY doubts about that !?!?!? šŸ™‚ - do you?

    J
    JonathanA.Bachm1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    February 14, 2014

    Hi everyone:


    Let me step in and make some suggestions and define a list of action that might address the concerns in this thread.


    What is see is both high level of frustration and some acknowledgement that ths is difficult stuff. I agree with both sides. There are improvements we can and are making to the product and documentation to address the administrative processes and tooling associated with Windchill.


    And I suspect everyone on this thread recognizes that running an enterprise system as important and powerful as PLM (any vendor's version) is a large sophisticated job. Let's take some of the energy in this thread and refine it to a point where I can bring it into our product planning / priortization process for resolution.


    Please contact me directly (email -) if you want to be included in a small meeting (I'll organize) to discuss your concerns and try to address them in a systematic fashion.


    Thanks,


    Jon Bachman
    VP of Product Management
    Windchill and Enterprise Infrastructure
    PTC


    -

    B
    23-Emerald III
    BenLoosli23-Emerald III
    23-Emerald III
    February 14, 2014
    Better is all relative! Better than 6.2.6, where I started using PDMlink, YES. Better than 9.1, where I am now, yes. Better than 10.0, where I am trying to get to, I certainly hope so.

    Your first sentence sums it up for all of us. Mike hit the nail on the head with his 600+ created documents to document how his company manages Windchill. Even PTC in their own documentation say you need to "Create a Work Instruction Document"* as the first step in an upgrade. I run 3 sets of Windchill servers. One is unclassified where I do OOTB testing, implementation, upgrades and documentation creation. I then have a test and production set of systems in a classified environment. I have to be sure I get my questions answered on the unclassified side because no one can see my classified side systems outside our office.

    *Windchill Upgrade Guide, Release 9.x to Release 10.0, Windchill 10.0 M040, May 2013, Chapter 2 - The Windchill Upgrade Procedure

    M
    MarcHendrickson1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    February 14, 2014
    I find it funny that PTC sells software that allow XML tagging so a company can generate owners manuals specific to a complex product that is configure to order but can not figure out how to use the same product to deliver admin guides specific to a companies Windchill configuration. I should be able to select the configuration architecture option from an overloaded BOM and the 100+ admin guides, best practices, white papers, etc... Should filter out all of the useless information that is not specific to my configuration.




    On Feb 14, 2014, at 11:15 AM, "Loosli, Ben H" <-<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline&quot;=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:-">>">mailto:->> wrote:

    Better is all relative! Better than 6.2.6, where I started using PDMlink, YES. Better than 9.1, where I am now, yes. Better than 10.0, where I am trying to get to, I certainly hope so.

    Your first sentence sums it up for all of us. Mike hit the nail on the head with his 600+ created documents to document how his company manages Windchill. Even PTC in their own documentation say you need to ā€œCreate a Work Instruction Documentā€* as the first step in an upgrade. I run 3 sets of Windchill servers. One is unclassified where I do OOTB testing, implementation, upgrades and documentation creation. I then have a test and production set of systems in a classified environment. I have to be sure I get my questions answered on the unclassified side because no one can see my classified side systems outside our office.

    *Windchill Upgrade Guide, Release 9.x to Release 10.0, Windchill 10.0 M040, May 2013, Chapter 2 ā€“ The Windchill Upgrade Procedure

    A
    ascorupco1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    February 14, 2014

    After venting off I must say I was somewhat unfair to PTC.


    One advice to future users or who are thinking of expanding WC that we ā€œall know thatā€ but somehow ending up there many times anyway:


    Make sure you have big IT budget and strong C level support (and I mean strong and committed beyond the phase of enthusiasm after talking to PTC sales reps and signing for example $0.1M, $1M or $10M contract)


    If you do not have this donā€™t go there. You will dedicate your best IT people and without money (to get decent consultants if needed) , without decent WC documentation and decent PTC support those good people will burnout and you will be left without people and system. Been there, done that.


    So really PTC documentation and support are only additional variables causing the frustration but ā€œdecisionsā€ were made and we march on!

    A
    AL_ANDERSON12-Amethyst
    12-Amethyst
    February 14, 2014
    I like PTC's documentation. Yes, its a lot, but most of it is excellent
    once you find the right manual.

    As for documenting the site-specific configurations and changes, I agree
    that there is a huge opportunity for PTC to help us out.

    I bet if they looked at all the places that have "Comments" and add some
    additional hangers for comments, that they could generate a "Windchill
    Doc" that makes online help files in HTML that list out all the
    configurations and their comments in a reasonable way. For example,
    lifecycle templates have comments, as do worflow template, activity
    template in the workflow templates, even contexts have "descriptions" and
    context preferences have "Descriptions" and when you edit them they have
    "Comments."

    If you could add comments to light types, IBAs, Administrative Domains,
    individual access control rules, OIRs, etc, then run a build job to
    travers all the site-created comments for anything that was modified from
    initial installation, you might generate something that looks like the
    Windchill Help only showing all the things you changed with your own
    comments as to why you changed them. The system would be mostly self
    documenting, and you might not need many word files and spreadsheets
    documenting all your configurations that are then hard to maintain over
    time.

    Al







    [solutions] - RE: [Windchill] - Why is Windchill Administration so
    cryptic!

    Hendrickson, Marc
    J
    jessh12-Amethyst
    12-Amethyst
    February 14, 2014
    For file-system-based configuration, e.g. xconfs, Apache configuration,
    etc, this can be achieved by managing the files in a version control
    system, complete with extensive comments for all changes, a history of
    all changes, an ability to rollback, etc.

    For configurations in the software itself, an ability to add comments in
    all of these places would obviously require enhancements to the software.

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