How does your team like Windchill?

[writchie]

Originally Posted by MegaSparks

Has any team other than ours used Windchill effectively? I use the term effectively as we have critical documents maintained there and have access to them from anywhere there is an internet connection. As a project manager I feel we have just scratched the surface of what Windchill can do. I personally would like to have FIRST pursue having this available for next year so we can tap into more of the capabilities of the tool.

We used Windchill from the start. It was a good tool but it is surprisingly
rough around the edges. It's Explorer/Microsoft centric and not very
intuitive for most of our students/teachers and mentors. The inability to
list people by name (instead of cryptic e-mail address) rendered it useless for many
tasks. It's incompatibility with the current version of Inventor also made it
very much less useful than it could have been.

Nevertheless, I think most of these problems could be overcome if it was
available to teams year round so that they could get through the learning curve
before the build season and fix some issues that seem to be associated
only with the FIRST setup. We even experimented with
PRO/Engineer looking for better integration but we found the restrictions on
the student version too crippling.

Since we don't know how long it will remain operational, we are presently
moving our stuff off the site and will probably move to a different solution
for collaboration. We used sharepoint last year with about the same net
results although Windchill could have been much better if the aforementioned
problems were solved.

I do commend PTC for making this available. It's really nice to have some
choice of Solidworks, PRO/E, and Inventor solutions available
to teams.