Migrating away from intralink 3.4

[sander]

I am working at a small engineering firm working with ProE3.
My two other colleagues are working also with intralink.

We have more-or-less decided we would do better without intralink. (too much overhead, hassle, not userfriendly for only simple version control. We're not doing collaborative projects)

Big question now is how to get all drawings, parts etc out of the database. (including all versions.)

We are going to consult our CAD supplier, but I would like to get some more insight in the matter itself...I have a lot of computer knowledge/programming skills, but no idea how intralink stores its data and how to pull info from it....

Can anyone shed some light on this issue ?

Thanks !

Sander
The Netherlands.

 

[FishNut]

Hmmm. Intersting dilemma. Nothing will be completely easy. You could work on a folder by folder basis, check out everything, then use the export command. I have just had terrible luck with the export command. Never works dependably for me. Export to the same folder.


You could check out all of your main assemblies (products that yousell), and theorectically every part you need would be included. You could check out into seperate workspaces if you needed to. Open the assembly into proe to get it into session. Then do a backup. Always backup to the same folder. Many assemblies may use the same parts,so you will have multiple versions in the folder, but thats ok. You can purge the folder when you're done. At the end though,you will need to do a check to see if you got everything. I don't know how big your CS is, but this could take a while.Do a search(locate) that will return everything.This couldbe name = *, whatever. Set your column display to show just the name.Then do a Print, and print to a text file. It will end up in your .proi folder under .data/user.data/html. Open this with wordpad. This is a text file that contains every name in your CS. Now you will want to check to see that for every name in this list there is a corresponding file in the folder where you exported. You will likely need someone to write a simple VB program do do this efficiently. Most IT people can write something to do this check fairly quckly. If you find you are missing soome parts, you will need to check then out and back them up into the same folder.


All this said I will still say this. Version control even with just a few engineers is pretty difficult, and I don't see how you will keep conflicts from happening. You may want to look at PTC's Productpoint. It is basic version control and is pretty much aimed at smaller companies that do not want to use a big PDM system like windchill. It is based onmicrosoft sharepoint, but a little bit better for cad because its set up to work with pro/e.

 

[jnoval]

You can used a tool. Look at http://www.sf.com/