**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!