In my last blog I opined that one of the top recent PTC innovations was Pro/INTRALINK going web-based. But after reading that posting again, it sounded sort of flat. I mean, what's the big deal with something going web-based? I mean, there are plenty of people out there who have no business being near a computer keyboard, and yet they have their own websites! With that in mind, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on just why I think a web-based Pro/INTRALINK is so cool.

For one thing, it never quite made sense to me that even though I could see the contents of my Pro/INTRALINK 3.x workspaces and commonspace in Pro/ENGINEER's embedded web browser (hey, the view even matched my client's table display!), I couldn't do much with it. Oh, sure, I could drag and drop files from my workspace into my Pro/E session, but I couldn't modify any object attributes inside that embedded browser. It's hard to enable all the features of a non-web-based application in an Internet browser. So I was always going back and forth between the Pro/INTRALINK client window and the Pro/ENGINEER window. And it really did serve its purpose, but only in the sense that a workshop where the power outlets are across the room from the workbench serves its purpose.

So I guess that's one of the first things I liked about the next generation of Pro/INTRALINK: being able to edit the attributes of a lot of objects all at once, without ever having to minimize my Pro/ENGINEER window or fish around my desktop for my Pro/INTRALINK client workspace window. OK, I admit that I'm not thrilled about the need to create the same table view multiple times depending upon my Pro/INTRALINK browser context (search results, workspace, etc.) - but on the other hand, that's pretty much what I had to do when I first set up Pro/INTRALINK 3.0 too.

Jeff Rembold
PTC Application Engineer, PTC