“Sunrise, sunset…” Luckily for me, my daughters aren’t old enough for me to worry abut hearing that song at their wedding receptions any time soon. But many of my customers have been complaining that PTC is singing it backward: “Sunset, sunrise” – threatening the Pro/INTRALINK 3.x sunset before the Windchill-based Pro/INTRALINK has fully risen. In terms of how many of them have been using Pro/INTRALINK 3.x, the complaint of missing functionality is quite valid. The good news is that with Pro/INTRALINK 9.0, I believe PTC has spun the Pro/ENGINEER data management globe rapidly to the east.

I’ll use my first Pro/INTRALINK 9.0 blog to highlight one of the items that many Pro/INTRALINK 3.x users – including myself – missed the most in Pro/INTRALINK 8.0: workspace import and export.

For those of you who are wondering what this is all about, in Pro/INTRALINK 3.x has the capability to import items from disk into a workspace, and to export items from a workspace to disk. The most common use cases are to share data with a supplier, customer, or other partner who did not have access to the Pro/INTRALINK database. In Pro/INTRALINK 8.0, aware that this functionality had been left out in favor of other priorities, PTC product management and technical support recommended a workaround: use Pro/ENGINEER to open the data from disk, and use Pro/ENGINEER to backup files to disk. That’s fine if you have access to Pro/ENGINEER and the data in question are Pro/ENGINEER files, but otherwise…sorry.

Pro/INTRALINK 9.0 removes this valid complaint – and takes things a step further in terms of usability. The new Workspace Import/Export (select Tools > Import to Workspace or Tools > Export from Workspace) not only fills the gap, but it allows enhances usability because it is available from both the standalone browser and the Pro/ENGINEER embedded browser.

Next time I’ll look at a few more of my 9.0 favorites, including some ease of use enhancements and other “gap-fillers.”

Like I said at the beginning of this blog, “Sunrise, sunset.” PTC’s customers are important enough that we’re making sure that the new sun is in the sky before the old one sets.