Working away from your office with Pro/E & Ilink

In my office we regularly have engineers visiting customers and bringing back lots of changes they want doing to model's or they bring back a CD with 500Mb of data and half of it with conflicts to resolve.



Since these engineer's use Pro/E and have suitable laptops I have loaded up Pro/E, data and file server and two intralink clients.

Then made it point to the same folder for any workspaces. This means the lap top will use the same workspaces where ever you are, you can check out work take it out of the office, work on it and when you return to the office you can check your work back in to common space directly.



The only problem I have had with this was when one lap top turn's it's

network card off when it's not plugged in!

I am not sure exactly where you have installed the Commonspace. Is it on the network, or on the local hard drive, and if on the local hard drive, how do you share the files with your network then.



But I have a solution for your Network turn off. I too had this problem, and it cased earlier versions of Pro-E (2000i) to not work. (New versions of Pro-E work around it) the solution was to make a small little network plug with the TX and RX signals crossed. That way the Laptop sends a TX and recieves it itself and thinks that it is active, but does not affect the operation of the system when not on a real network.



Please clarify your offline solution some more as we currently have to Export and then Re-import the files that have changed.

A few more details:

First get a license from PTC for the lap top for Pro/E and Intralink, you set the license up on the machine as node locked.



1. configure the lap top as a normal workstation with Pro/E and Intralink Client.



2. configure the lap top as a server.

load up the data server, file server and flexlm to a load point's like:

C:\ptc\dataserver

C:\ptc\fileserver

C:\ptc\flexlm



Then load up another Intralink Client on the lap top, I use a load point like C:\ptc\client2.

Configure this client to use the server you have just created on the lap top.



To make both clients use the same workspace the workspace must be stored locally (our workstations have workspaces on a network drive which is backed up), so edit both client .BAT file's and insert a line like:

'set PDM_LDB_PATH=C:\workspace'



Thanks for the tip on the network card!



Ian.