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As part of the recent meeting between PTC/USER and PTC executives, we submitted questions solicited from the user community through the PTC/USER E-mail Exploder. We wish to thank our members for the terrific response. We received a number of excellent questions and many of them are published here along with PTC’s responses. Some questions have been edited for length and/or stylistic concerns.
Due to time constraints, we were not able to answer all questions received. However, we will attempt to follow up on questions for publication in future issues of Profiles Magazine.
A: Windchill® ProjectLink™, the first out-of-the-box Windchill solution, was initially developed as a special-purpose application of Windchill to allow manufacturing companies to collaborate with their suppliers and customers across organizational boundaries and beyond the company’s firewall. While many customers have adopted Windchill ProjectLink in this standalone fashion, many existing Windchill customers asked PTC to make this capability available in a fashion where it would dovetail into their existing Windchill PDM deployments. In response, PTC has developed a roadmap to achieve this tighter level of interoperability. Windchill® PDMLink™ and Windchill ProjectLink will be essentially merged together on the same platform with Windchill release 7.0 scheduled for Summer 2003. Also, with the incorporation of Web technology into Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, Windchill ProjectLink and Windchill PDMLink will be more tightly integrated with Pro/ENGINEER than in any previous releases.
A: PTC has several major ongoing activities to improve customer satisfaction. Goals and incentives have been established around customer satisfaction for PTC employees. Customer satisfaction surveys are distributed twice annually to over 100,000 persons at customer sites. A number of initiatives have been launched to address issues, including Customer Care, simplified license management and order processing, revised documentation and help systems, process improvements to address software quality. Details on the survey process and results are available online at www.ptc.com/company/customers/feedback.htm.
A: This information is readily available via the Web at www.ptc.com in the technical services area. The TAN tracker allows a customer to see what SPRs are addressed between any two builds of a product. On a related note, customers can signup for knowledge base alerts that summarize new TPIs by visiting www.ptc.com/cgi/cs/apps/start/launch_application?kdb.
A: The Customer Support organization handles about 5000 calls per week. PTC attempts to answer as many calls as possible with a support person, and internal metrics say that 70% of calls placed are answered live. This has not varied significantly in recent times. Technical support is goaled on achieving a range of performance targets and is increasingly focusing on responsiveness and time to resolve problems as key measures of their success.
A: PTC spent $100 million on Pro/ENGINEER improvements in the Wildfire release, the vast majority of which represents improvements to existing modules that will directly benefit existing customers. PTC currently reinvests 19% of revenue into research and development. PTC does not explicitly break out the dollars invested into functionality for new products versus existing products, but a significant majority of overall R&D expenditure is reinvested in improving existing products.
A: With Wildfire, PTC will be simplifying software packaging, which should help to reduce the number of overall configurations in the customer base. Details will be forthcoming.
A: PTC recently announced Pro/CONCEPT, a solution for industrial designers and artists. It is intended to provide up-front, easy-to-use conceptual design capabilities, including sketching and painting. Pro/DESKTOP is being repositioned as a more basic tool for use in the education market.
A: This issue was raised with PTC executives. The tight integration now available between Wildfire and Windchill PDMLink introduces a CMII-certified change management process (see www.icmhq.com) directly into the Pro/ENGINEER usage model. PTC has accepted an action to work with the PTC/USER Technical Committees to conduct an in-depth review of this new functionality, and to identify and work on additional improvements that can be made.
A: PTC is fully committed to providing continued enhancements to and support for Pro/INTRALINK. Ongoing Pro/INTRALINK development activities are focused primarily on quality, reliability, and solution integration. This includes ongoing development of the Pro/INTRALINK Gateway to provide a tighter connection between Pro/INTRALINK and Windchill product lifecycle management solutions. Furthermore, PTC has plans to enhance and automate multi-site replication tools. Windchill PDMLink continues to be enhanced and will soon subsume most if not all of Pro/INTRALINK functionality for managing Pro/ENGINEER data. PTC is also developing migration tools to simplify the transition from Pro/INTRALINK to Windchill PDMLink for customers choosing to do so. Customers who have not implemented a PDM solution should take a strong look at Windchill PDMLink first before making any purchasing decisions.
A: Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire will be the first release of Pro/ENGINEER to deliver "cross-release interoperability." Users will be able to save models created in Pro/E Wildfire such that they can be read in by earlier version of Pro/E, as far back as release 2000i. When these models are retrieved in the earlier versions they can be referenced for future features or components, but cannot be modified using the older software. However, the original models can of course be modified in Pro/E Wildfire, and if they are, any changes will be automatically reflected in the derived models used in the earlier releases.
A: Upon Shipment of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, compatible versions of Windchill PDMLink, Windchill ProjectLink, ProductView and Pro/MECHANICA will be available. Within one quarter of the Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire shipment, Pro/INTRALINK release 3.3 will be available, which will be compatible with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire.
A: PTC is actively working on projects with major electronic design automation (EDA) tool providers to improve information exchange between their products and Pro/ENGINEER. PTC is not yet prepared to commit to availability dates for this work.
A: It is natural that changes made in the name of product improvements and forward progression serve to change the interfaces between products, creating interdependencies between products that have compatible interfaces. Unfortunately, these types of dependencies will continue to exist in PTC products much as they do in products from Microsoft or other vendors. This problem could theoretically be simplified if PTC required that all products be upgraded simultaneously as a single system, rather than allowing components to be upgraded individually. However, it is PTC’s understanding from customers that to require an upgrade of all Pro/E clients at the same time as upgrading Pro/INTRALINK or Windchill PDMLink is unrealistic. Therefore, it will be necessary to continue to offer combinations of software versions that work together and to publish a compatibility matrix to help customers with their planning.
A: PTC is passionate about ensuring that their customers successfully adopt Wildfire and have some very aggressive corporate goals to ensure this happens. They now believe that their job is not complete upon shipping the CD, but that they must also develop products and services that facilitate the adoption of new software releases by its users. To this end PTC has developed a quick reference guide, multimedia introduction, Web-based help, and a menu mapper for the release of Wildfire.
A: Over the past several releases, PTC has incrementally implemented new features into the interface to improve ease-of-use. These changes require some relearning of functions and have an initial negative impact on productivity, particularly for experienced software users. This is a major concern for PTC, and is why they opted for a more holistic approach of modifying the user interface, rather than incorporating improvements in a piecemeal fashion.
With the release of Wildfire, users can expect the overall interface to stabilize. Furthermore, there have been some encouraging studies that show that both novice and experienced users can become far more productive with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire than with either previous releases of Pro/E or competing CAD software. 
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