Windchill EPM Gateways allow companies to maintain their current engineering workgroup management solutions for innovative work-in-process activities, while making that information available to the enterprise via Web-centric Windchill. Windchill EPM Gateways maintain connectivity between Windchill and the source workgroup solution by publishing references for parts, assemblies, product structures, drawings, images viewable with Windchill ProductView, and meta-data from the workgroup solution into Windchill. While the actual files remain outsourced in a local vault that provides a work-in-process framework for engineering, visibility to this valuable knowledge is now made available to the extended enterprise community via various Windchill enterprise applications that are used throughout the product and process lifecycle.
Windchill EPM Gateways will be offered for a variety of mechanical and electrical engineering authoring tools.
The Windchill EPM Gateway publishing mechanism creates Windchill objects such as parts, assemblies, and drawings in the Windchill environment by extracting the object definition, component quantity, and product structure created in the source system. In addition to publishing to the standard Windchill object model, Windchill EPM Gateways also publish to any customizations made to the object model. All published objects in the Windchill environment have uniform resource locators (URLs) referencing the information within the workgroup system. Windchill ProductView image files are also created and saved as content.
Windchill administrators can define publishing criteria based on an object's release level and on scheduled intervals. This provides flexibility in controlling when in its lifecycle an object should be available to the enterprise and how frequently publishing should occur – overnight using a batch process, on an interval basis or on demand.
Viewing Product Information
All published information can be visualized from within Windchill using Windchill ProductView. When Windchill URLs referencing viewable information from the source system are selected, Windchill ProductView will be launched and the appropriate viewable image will be displayed for investigation, manipulation, and markup. All the graphics are stored in a cache for extremely quick retrieval using Windchill ProductView.
Windchill EPM Gateway Administration
The publishing process is automatic, and an administrator can easily configure its behavior. There are several configuration settings available to the administrator to customize their gateway implementation.
Scheduling
Windchill EPM Gateways provide a publishing schedule mechanism used to specify the frequency with which objects are published to Windchill. At the specified interval, the gateway looks to the source system to identify any objects that meet the publishing requirement. Windchill EPM Gateways work in the background without any need for user interaction.
Release Level Mapping
Windchill EPM Gateway publishing is initiated based on the release level of the object in the workgroup information management system. The gateway provides the capability to retrieve release levels from the source workgroup system and the administrator can select the minimum release level to be published.
Folder Mapping
The administrator has the ability to define the mapping between folders in the source system and the folder structure in Windchill. Such flexible folder mapping allows the separation of data according to the needs of the enterprise instead of just simple folder to folder mapping.
Object Names
By using the naming methodology in the source system, the published objects can be given a customized naming scheme in Windchill. Automatic numbering of Windchill objects is also available if a unique identifier does not exist.
Newer published versions will inherit older versions' relationships and content without requiring any re-mapping. This will allow the workgroup solution users to continue working without having to worry about any data synchronization issues.
Log File
The Windchill EPM Gateway creates a log of the publishing process, providing a means to track gateway activity and investigate any issues. If the log exposes an issue, an e-mail notification can be sent out automatically containing a URL pointing directly to the error recorded in the log file.
Windchill EPM Gateway Support
Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) currently offers support for the Pro/INTRALINK® Gateway and Pro/PDM™ Gateway. Pro/INTRALINK is PTC's premier information management environment for Pro/ENGINEER® user communities. Focusing exclusively on managing Pro/ENGINEER information, Pro/INTRALINK facilitates collaboration among design teams and effectively manages the power of Pro/ENGINEER's associativity.
Pro/PDM is the predecessor to Pro/INTRALINK and is being used extensively by a large number of customers to manage Pro/ENGINEER information. Pro/PDM, like Pro/INTRALINK offers a collaborative design environment that allows multiple designers to work concurrently on the same design.
By integrating distributed design and development activities, Windchill EPM Gateways can dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring complex and innovative products to market.