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

[PTC_FRC]

Hi all,

Thanks for your interest in ProjectLink for your FRC team. I am happy to answer questions you have on the use of ProjectLink, Pro/E and Mathcad.

Many of you had asked about the number of licenses being provided. We are offering each member of your team a license of Pro/E and Mathcad. These are node locked licenses and are tied to the local machine. You do not need to access a license server. You only need to be connected to the internet to generate the license. Once the license is created, you no longer need to have access to the internet.

As for the use of Pro/E and Mathcad, I can understand the challenge of moving from a known system to a new one. We have tried to assist in this effort by providing ample training via the web-based training portal. This is available at http://first.ptculms.com. User can register for this portal and take web-based training modules for Pro/E (modeling, assemblies, mechanism, Sheetmetal, detailing, etc) and Mathcad.

ProjectLink is a web-based project management system. It allows users to conduct design reviews, hold meetings, discussions forums for the teams, manage the history and revisions of documents and CAD data, notification and routing of documents, project planning, etc. We have included a number of training modules for ProjectLink in the training portal listed above.

As for managing CAD data, ProjectLink can manage many types of CAD data. For this year’s competition, we will be providing the ability to manage native Pro/E and Inventor data. Solidworks can be managed in ProjectLink, but we do not offer the work group manager (WGM) that would connect Solidworks to ProjectLink. This will be something we can consider for next year. If the WGM is not available for your application, you can still take advantage of ProjectLink. In this case, you can store the data as a zipped file into ProjectLink. This file will be controlled and versioned. Users will be able to check-out the document (zip file), disallowing anyone else to update it until the user checked in back in. Each check-in will iterate the file keeping past iterations for future design variations.

These projects have been setup for your team. The goal of ProjectLink is to unite your team members in an environment that they can conduct the design of their robots. Since this is available on the web, users regardless of where they are located can work individually or together. I will be providing a small video showing many of the ways team members can work together. I will be sending this out shortly.

If you have further questions, please let me know. My contact email is mfischer@ptc.com or firstsupport@ptc.com

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Mark Fischer
Director – PTC Education