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Interresting to read. We are in the process of buying PDMLink right now (using intralink at the moment). We are going for r8.
I have heard from manythat the performance can be terrible. It seems you have to let PTC in to tune the software to get decent performance. It will cost you, but if it gives the results, it would be worth it.
What build of PDMLink 7 are you running? There are performance problems in builds prior toM050 that are fixed by a patch, at least in M040. See tan 130005. When we applied this patch at one company, the download time for a sample 1600 piece assembly went from22 minutes to under 6 minutes.
What build of Pro/E are you running? In builds between M070 andM140 on Windows XP, the download,in the embedded browser, would say it had completed, but when you went to open the file in Pro/E, the system would have to download the files again. The system was deleting the files from the cache folder after the download.
Yes, PTC does charge you for if you want someone to come in a tune the system. The problem is that there are only a handful of people within PTC who really understand how to tune the system and the best person is grounded because he has been travelling too much and told PTC no more travel or he would find another job. IF you had a quickstart program, you may be able to get some relief from the tuning bills by refusing to pay for the quickstart until the performance is better.
We are running M050 in Windchill 7.0 and a week ago we got M170 in Wildfire 2.0. We have installed it on some users to se if it is better performance, but we havent noted any difference.
Is the performance much better in windchill 8.0 than in 7.0?
Since we changed from Auto Cad to ProE and Windchill we have been much less effective. We are a pretty small company with 10 machine designers using ProE. I believe that Intralink would have been a better choise for us. We have payed a lot for Windchill so it doesent feel right to look at Intralink now. Maybe we will look at a non PTC PDM system because we are not satisfied with the support.
M170 was pulled from the PTC website and repalced with M171.
If you are only doing local data management, PDMLink was overkill. Intralink could have handled the task okay. The upgrade to Intralink 8, which is a subset of PDMLink 8, would have been much less painful.
With some tuning with the dm_network_threads config.pro setting, we did see more improvement. The default value is 3 and 5 gave better performance. Even though it is a config.pro setting, it requires a restart of Pro/E to take effect. Some PTC documentation references an environment variable, prowt_threads, but after a lot of pushing on my part for PTC to explain the difference, they admitted that prowt_threads is obsolete and will be removed from future documentation. It is in the PDMLink 8 Tuning guide, so don't expect it to disappear overnight.
Halo, why do you think 6 minutes to download, not open in Pro/E, a 1600 piece assembly is insane? In this case it is almost 600MB of date being transferred from the server to the client.
No one has ever claimed that implementing a PDM system on top of CAD was a time saver. We figure that our designers now spend 20-25% of there time on PDM tasks instead of designing new parts. With Intralink, it was about 10%.
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