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

[Don Wright]

I finally got the information and had a chance to play with it a little today. Going to get some of the students to play with it a bit too and see if it's something we can use...

As for using SolidWorks... I just created new parts in WindChill and used the Solidworks parts as reference. Yes, you can't use the built in Windchill viewer/editor...but it still seems to work...

While the structure seems good as a project manager, it seems cumbersome to me (at this point) for dealing with sub-assemblies, etc...

Also, and maybe I've missed it, but the documentation falls into the usual pitfall of technical documentation. It lacks the 30,000 feet view of how the software is supposed to work all together with schedules, ProE, Mathcad, etc... It immediately goes right into specifics and totally lacks the philosophy behind how the software was designed and set-up for a project...

I still am playing around and am not giving up yet... But, if someone has found this overview document, please let me know.

I really appreciate the tool and am happy they are donating the resources to FIRST, but if it takes teams a fair amount of time to know how the system works and how to set their project up, it won't be used.