At this year’s Pro/USER International Conference, attendees again had an opportunity to submit questions about the capabilities and direction of specific PTC products. Here are some of the responses that PTC managers have supplied to conference-goers’ queries.

Pro/MECHANICA® is running with Pro/INTRALINK® 3.0, but not 2.0. This means additional work for Pro/MECHANICA users. How can it be that different strategic software programs from the same company do not work together?

Pro/MECHANICA 2001 does in fact support both Pro/INTRALINK 2.0 and 3.0. The confusion about this may have arisen from the fact that the pre-production release of Pro/MECHANICA 2001 supported only 3.0.

ISDX is a very good addition to the PTC product line. Are there any plans for a similar level of integration with ICEM® Surf?

Leveraging best-in-class technologies between PTC surfacing products and Pro/ENGINEER® is an important component of our strategy. Expect to see many breakthrough process improvements in coming releases, including significant reuse of some exciting ICEM® technology directly within the Pro/ENGINEER environment. Potential areas include powerful surface analysis capabilities to improve real-time understanding of the design, and global deformation tools that allow you to make dramatic changes to the product shape.

Can you provide a clear, definitive statement on Pro/PDM® support through the end of 2004?

PTC will retire Pro/PDM on October 1, 2001, at which time most customers’ Pro/PDM maintenance agreements will expire. PTC is providing a variety of tools that should help ease the transition from Pro/PDM to Pro/INTRALINK, including Pro/CONVERT® , a Migration Process Checklist, a training course, and Global Services offerings for migration planning, assistance or execution. Note that PTC continues to offer a special Pro/PDM to Pro/INTRALINK software upgrade at nearly 85% percent off the Pro/INTRALINK list price. PTC is also offering a Pro/PDM Migration Support package that allows customers to receive Pro/PDM support until they are able to move to Pro/INTRALINK or at the latest until October 1, 2003. Contact your PTC sales executive for the prerequisites, terms and pricing of this package.

Any plans to allow creation of deformed shapes (e.g., as a part, a spring is relaxed; in an assembly, it is compressed)?

This is an area of active research for PTC developers. The intent is to have multiple occurrences of a flexible part in a single assembly, with accurate geometric representations (different shapes) as well as an accurate BOM (same part number).

We need to give a customer a model of a component for maintenance training but cannot give him the associated data. I believe Shrinkwrap may be the right tool, but will our customer have access to dimensions?

Shrinkwrap is ideal in situations where you need to share Pro/ENGINEER data but do not want to disclose the proprietary engineering intelligence or feature history of the design. This tool allows you to deliver the external definition of the design (including topologically accurate copies of external surfaces) for use in packaging studies and other requirements. Since the external surfaces are topologically accurate and the Shrinkwrap model is a Pro/ENGINEER part, you can use standard tools to measure distances, or use “Created Dimensions” after the model is placed in a drawing. The dimensions belonging to the features used to create the original model, however, are not accessible. Inheritance Features, a new capability in Pro/ENGINEER ® 2001, allows you to create a new model, associatively copy the entire part definition— including feature dimensions— and then modify the resulting derived model. If you want to allow someone to work with a design but also ensure that no changes are made to the actual design, this is probably the best approach because it also allows access to dimensional values. Inheritance Features are in the Advanced Assembly Extension in Release 2001.

We use Pro/INTRALINK on HP-UX. We would migrate from 2.0 to 3.0 but Pro/INTRALINK is only running on HP-UX 11.0. What is PTC’s strategy for customers to migrate a larger number of HP-UX stations to Pro/INTRALINK 3.0?

Because of compatibility differences with third-party software that Pro/INTRALINK relies on, we do not have a version of Pro/INTRALINK that operates on both HP-UX 10.20 and 11.0. The machines should be upgraded when Pro/INTRALINK is upgraded.

Why can’t PTC produce accurate, consistent product roadmaps and delivery schedules? It is impossible to plan and budget without them.

Plans for software delivery do, of course, change during the development cycle so close communication with your PTC team is the best way to keep up to date. Your local account team and/or your PTC Global Services consultant have access to the latest corporate information and to the product “owners” whenever you need clarification for planning and budgeting purposes.