I sent this message on the PTC/USER Exploder, but also felt that it was important to provide and update about Windchill 8.0 - Pro/ENGINEER workspace performance and our efforts to improve it, on the Pro/INTRALINK Advisor.

We made great progress improving Windchill performance managing Pro/ENGINEER data with 8.0, particularly versus 7.0 – please see the Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 Delivers Improved Productivity whitepaper for a detailed discussion of how Windchill and Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 compare favorably with Pro/INTRALINK 3.x in the LAN and totally surpass Pro/INTRALINK 3.x for WAN usage. Overall our data and use model shows Windchill and Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 productivity to be comparable to Pro/INTRALINK 3.x productivity in a LAN environment with some specific operations begin faster and some slower. We improved workspace refresh and display time performance by 3-5x from 7.0 to 8.0, but still have several ongoing efforts to further improve workspace display performance making it much closer to Pro/INTRALINK 3.x, especially for larger workspaces. These efforts include:

• Windchill and Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 M020 will include a performance enhancement which, combined with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 M210, has been measured to improve workspace display performance by 20+%. We are considering additional performance enhancements for later maintenance releases of 8.0 as well.

• We are working closely with Microsoft, through our Gold Partnership, to identify workspace performance enhancements to Internet Explorer 6.0, the embedded browser in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire on the Windows platforms. Microsoft and PTC worked together to isolate the factors affecting workspace performance in the Pro/ENGINEER Internet Explorer embedded browser. Microsoft has identified a change that could be made to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that would benefit Windchill Pro/ENGINEER Workspace performance, but additional internal steps are necessary at Microsoft before they can give us a firm commitment as to if and when the enhancement will be available.

In the meantime – there are a number of performance best practices that PTC can recommend to optimize user productivity when using Windchill 8.0 to manage Pro/ENGINEER data. I discuss some of these in my Pro/INTRALINK Advisor blog, “WAN Performance - The Performance Criteria for the 21st Century” blog: http://www.ptc.com/community/prointralink8/blogs/gerdes/gerdes_4.htm.

Additional resources you can turn to for information about performance and productivity include:

· Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 Delivers Improved Productivity: http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/31528en_file1.pdf
This paper discusses the productivity benefits of Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 – which are the same as Windchill PDMLink 8.0 and includes a number of recommended user best practices – also discussed in another blog of mine:
Roundtripping: http://www.ptc.com/community/prointralink8/blogs/gerdes/gerdes_2.htm

· Windchill Performance Tuning Guide: http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/24289en_file1.pdf
The Windchill Performance Tuning Guide is designed to help improve the performance and scalability of the Windchill system.

· Workgroup Manager Performance Best Practices Guide: http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/31802en_file1.pdf
This guide provides guidelines for increasing workgroup manager performance.

I hope you find this information useful – and would simply like to add that PTC is totally committed to delivering best in class performance with PTC’s product development system.

Best regards,

Victor