Administering a Large Number of PTC Installations - Part I
Administering more then a few seats of Pro/Engineer can be a daunting task without adding some automation to the process. This article discusses using Windows Batch files to greatly simplify the administration procedure.
Anyone that has administered more then a couple seats of Pro/Engineer knows how large of a task that actually is. Part I of this article discusses principles behind automating administration tasks and well as philosophies of simplified administration.
First and foremost, Company Standards must be implemented and easy to maintain. We recommend an identical mapped drive (ie. same drive letter and same destination) on each user system for company standards. Folders that we recommend including in this shared drive are:
Config: contains user-definable items such as color maps, lights, etc that users can use if they do not intend to create their own. It also contains the configs to be copied in the startup script discussed in Part III.
Formats: All formats should be kept in this folder.
Notes: Standard note texts should be placed here to standardize note creation and wording.
Plot_Config: This directory should contain dtl files as well as pcf files.
Plot_Files: We recommend using this standard directory to save plot files in. Of course, a regular cleanup process is needed to remove older files. We also recommend setting up a Windows file type to send these files to the plotter right a double-click.
Scripts: This folder contains installation and startup scripts discussed in Parts II and III.
Symbols: All company standard symbols should be placed in this directory.
Templates: Start Parts and Drawing Templates should be stored here.
Most of these folders should be read-only except for an administrator with the exception being the Plot_Files.
Next we will discuss directory structure. Most companies I've seen may have a standard installation directory for each client, but do not have a standard for each release. For instance, 2000i is installed in c:\proe2000i while 2000i2 is installed in c:\proe2000i2. We strongly recommend installing to a standard directory even for each release. ie. the old version is removed and the new version installed into the same folder. You will notice in the script in Part II that we use \ptc\pro, \ptc\ilink etc. This greatly simplifies upgrades and allows the script to easily remove the old version before installing the new version.
Finally, user working directories should be standardized. While different companies will have different opinions on where these directories should be located, we've found that the best practice is to create a mapped drive to a server user directory. This is even more important if you have users that may occasionally work on a different user's system. These can then be tied to the Windows Login. And access to Intralink can be kept secure for each user's workspace.
For more information, please read Parts II and III of this article.