**FIRST EMAIL**/FIRST Announces PTC Collaboration Software Sponsorship!

[Mark McLeod]

Greetings Teams:

FIRST is pleased to announce that PTC, The Product Development Company, is The Collaboration Sponsor for this year’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). Through this sponsorship, PTC is offering a hosted version of its collaboration solution, Windchill, to be used by FRC teams to improve collaboration among team members, helping teams work faster and smarter during the build season in the following ways:


* Create Web-based, compartmentalized project portals and easily self-administer team access to content -- Project portals enable everyone to track the project schedule, deliverables, status and associated tasks while personalized subscription and notification capabilities allow members to be attuned to the latest changes
* On-line discussion forums enable teams to keep track of conversations between members and decisions made
* Web-based portal reduces the need for travel and increases the responsiveness to issues
* Robust document management capabilities allow teams to manage any documents as well as special purpose capabilities to manage CAD data and visualize CAD data -- Visualization capabilities enable all team members to see designs and take measurements, and markup and add comments without access to the CAD application itself
* Comprehensive project management and execution capabilities including the ability to define and manage milestones, tasks, deliverables and resources
* FRC project template pre-loaded with “Getting Started” Guide, online tutorials, and FRC schedule


Registration process for a Windchill-based FRC team project

Registration is easy. Each team interested in using Windchill to manage their FRC team project should have their team leader register for a project. The team leader will be the project manager and will manage member access to the project. Each project will use a project template created specially for FRC. Within the project, team members will have access to a 'getting started' guide that will aid them in using Windchill for collaboration and content management related to all aspects of their robot design project. In addition, team members can review the FRC critical schedule dates via the Windchill Project Plan.

[Team Leaders can] register for a project team today. From within the project you can download, Mathcad Student Edition for documenting and solving engineering calculations.

Go Teams!

[Elgin Clock]

Ooh... that's interesting.

PTC makes both the Pro-E CAD software, and also MathCAD as well.

Hmmm....

[Madison]

Mark, did you edit anything out of this e-mail blast? I'm waiting for this to be forwarded to me by our main contact. I'd like to take a look at what this has to offer, but it doesn't seem to provide any actual information about how to get started.

Windchill:
http://www.ptc.com/appserver/mkt/products/home.jsp?k=37

I'm particularly interested in how it manages CAD data and whether or not it'll handle native Solidworks (or Inventor, for that matter) files -- or whether it's tailored for PTC's own Pro/E.

[Pat McCarthy]

Originally Posted by M. Krass

I'm particularly interested in how it manages CAD data and whether or not it'll handle native Solidworks (or Inventor, for that matter) files -- or whether it's tailored for PTC's own Pro/E.

Looks like it can handle a bunch of design packages, AutoCAD, Inventor, Solidworks..
http://www.ptc.com/products/discipli...ions/index.htm

[Mark McLeod]

I removed the link to the screen that creates the team leader login account. There's no information there. It just sets up the account, then sends a verification email with the real link.

There's no obvious validation of who's creating the account, so I thought it best to leave that link to team leaders.

P.S.
The documentation in Windchill seems pretty Pro/E-centric, but I haven't read it yet.

[Tottanka]

I've just started using it, it's awesome!

The main contact is the one creating the accout.
After that he recieves a confirmation mail, and only later he can see in the project managing itself a file which instructs him how to start.

I should just mention that it's awesome,
You can let all you team members be a part of it, your sponser or just guests (you can make them belong to different groups with different user modes).
You can arrange meeting through it, and ofcourse, cad managing is aweosme!

STRONGLY SUGGESTED TO ALL TEAMS!

[Madison]

I've been looking it over a bit this morning and it seems interesting, if a bit overwhelming at first. It seems to allow online project management in the same sense that Microsoft's Sharepoint does -- the software we've begun using this season -- but it is also tailored specifically for CAD file version management. The installation of Windchill we're being provided includes support for both Inventor and Pro/E, though because my team uses Solidworks, I'm not sure if it'll be helpful for us. For teams that use Inventor, this should become a great resource.

Also included are licenses of Pro/E Schools Edition and MathCAD. I'm not sure if there's a limit to the number of seats available of each per team, but it initially appears as if there is not. This is a nice gesture, certainly, and necessary to get the most out of the Windchill software, I'd guess. I don't know if we want to deal with the headache of trying to adapt to Pro/E, though, and I'm concerned about what'll happen to our data at the end of the season. With our Sharepoint setup, at least we're in control of our data.

[Don Wright]

I did the registration this morning, but haven't received anything yet. How long did it take to get a a reply?

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Don Wright

I did the registration this morning, but haven't received anything yet. How long did it take to get a a reply?

I registered at about 11 PM Pacific last night and received a reply overnight -- it must be automated. It took about three hours.

[Mark McLeod]

No more than a half hour for me for the confirmation email to arrive.

[Don Wright]

I wonder if it cross references the list of leader email addresses, because it has Gail's email address, not mine...

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Don Wright

I wonder if it cross references the list of leader email addresses, because it has Gail's email address, not mine...

I used all of my own information and I'm not our main contact, so I don't think it will be a problem.

[dsmoker]

M. Krass, do I correctly assume from your mantra (Dancing through life . . .) that you, like me, are a musical theater enthusiast as well as a robotics nut?

[Madison]

Originally Posted by dsmoker

M. Krass, do I correctly assume from your mantra (Dancing through life . . .) that you, like me, are a musical theater enthusiast as well as a robotics nut?

Veering off topic for just a moment...

Yep, I love musical theater. With respect to Wicked, I've seen it twice so far. I try not to subject the team to too many cast recordings during the build season, but it's so hard to resist.

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Don Wright

I did the registration this morning, but haven't received anything yet. How long did it take to get a a reply?

The main contact for our team sent me the project manager login credentials this morning; seems like the registration didn't take very long. So I logged in and added my e-mail address to the list of members, but I haven't yet gotten a reply in the 12 hours since then. I've tried since then with a couple other e-mail addresses, but nothing has come through (yes, I did check the spam bin). Has anyone been successful at adding other people to their projects? (Or do they maybe have some sort of script that sends out all the queued e-mails in the middle of the night?)

I'm somewhat disappointed that PTC isn't providing support for CAD versioning of Solidworks and other softwares. According to the literature, they produce plug-ins for Inventor and Solidworks (and Unigraphics, Catia, etc.) but are only providing the Inventor one free of charge. I guess it wouldn't be a sound business decision, though, to pass up the opportunity to influence thousands of potential future customers into using Pro/ENGINEER.