PDM Solutions

[Roxel]

Hello

Firstly sorry if any of this is confusing or unclear - im new to the data management side of things, Pro/ENGINEER operation is more my thing so bear with me!

My company is currently running an ancient version of Pro/PDM to manage drawings, models and documentation etc (not quite sure of the release but it would be late 1990's era). We currently have 11 Pro/ENGINEER 2000i (yes 2000i!) seats/licences. As Pro/PDM is no longer supported these days we have a potential problem should the system fail in any shape or form. At the same time we would like to upgrade to Wildfire 3.0 but as you probably realise Pro/PDM does not support the latest Pro/ENGINEER files and to complicate it further we would like to move away from the Silicon Graphics 'unix' platform to todays favourite Windows XP. We have thousands of historic drawings/models/assemblies spread over multiple Silicon Graphics machines which would need to be tranfered from Pro/PDM to the chosen solution. Our Pro/ENGINEEER and Pro/PDM software is heavily customised (being in the defence industry) and is likely to add to the complication.
Also our company now requires a PDM solution that will integrate both AutoCAD and Pro/ENGINEER files, which doesnt seem to be too much of a problem looking at some of the solutions on the market. The two suggestions so far have been Windchill and Agile, however i have no experience of either. Pro/INTRALINK has been looked at but conversion of Pro/PDM files does not seem feasible.

Does anybody have any recommendations or ideas of a way forward in terms of selecting a PDM solution that will meet the above criteria (conversion to windows platform, retaining historic ProPDM files, integrating AutoCAD and ProENGINEER drawing control and allowing for the introduction of Wildfire 3.0)?

 

[sumeet_k29]

Pro/PDM does manages files upto Wildfire II but YES WF III is a bit of problem for PDM. As you have said that you would like that the data mgmt tool would manage both Pro/E files as well as Auto CAD files..yes I guess Agile is a better bet because f its ability to handle both these files plus AGILE is easy to suctomise and as you have mentione d that at present you have lot of customisation done to PDM / Pro/e.


Agile & WF III work well on XP and are pretty much stable but Pro/e does gives some trouble if you open very big assemblies but that has been the case throughout.

 

[looslib]

Windchill-based solutionswill mange both file types. Depending on workflow requirements if you want Intralink or PDMlink.


We are in the process of finishing a migration from Pro/PDM to PDMLink with WF2.


I-cubed has migration tools avialble to help with the files moving from Pro/PDm to a Windchill-based solution.

 

[Hacks]

Check out these links...


http://www.proe.com/print_article.php?cpfeatureid=10621


http://www.proe.com/specialreports/2005_PDM_ProE.pdf

 

[looslib]

The Special Report link is showing a very limited set of PDM/PLM tolls available for the Pro/E market.


For PTC products they reference Intralink 3.4 and PDMLink 8. Why not Intralink 8?


There are no UGS products listed. They do have products, TeamCenter Engineering, that can manage Pro/E data.

 

[Hacks]

Which ones would you add (other than TCE from UGS) to make this
listing not very limited?


Maybe Intralink 8.0 isn't explicitly mentioned since it's a subset of
PDMLink 8.0 (e.g., the PDM functionality in PDMLink is Intralink 8.0).

 

[sroamer]

Use Pro/Convert to convert Pro/PDM to Pro/Intralink 3.x.


Then use Pro/I 3.x to PDMLink or Intralink 8.0 data migrator to migrate the data to PDML or Pro/I 8.0


All solutions are from PTC -- the most reliable source of migrating Pro/Engineer data. And they are probably free if you are maintenance paying.