CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
2 June 2008
Product News
PTC Announces Windchill® ProductPoint™ Its New SharePoint®-Based Solution for Product Development
PTC announced Windchill ProductPoint, its new solution for capturing, handling, and sharing product development information.
“Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is breaking the milestone of 100 million licenses sold this year. Capitalizing on this momentum, PTC has developed Windchill ProductPoint based on the SharePoint platform and .NET framework. With Windchill ProductPoint, PTC extends the collaboration capabilities of SharePoint to offer product development companies the ability to manage and share structured product content in multiple CAD formats," said Brian J. Scott, vice president, worldwide industry strategy, Microsoft Corporation. "Microsoft and PTC have built a deep relationship throughout the development of Windchill ProductPoint and we look forward to furthering our partnership."
Windchill ProductPoint will give SharePoint reach into the world of Product Development. Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft’s technology infrastructure for collaboration, has been well adopted across manufacturing companies as a backbone for Office applications, primarily for document sharing and management. With Windchill ProductPoint, PTC will enable SharePoint to understand CAD (computer-aided-design) data, increasing the reach of the familiar SharePoint user experience, and enhancing its usage across broader product development teams. For OEMs and suppliers, a future release of Windchill ProductPoint is planned to support the sharing of information among other Windchill-based systems. Small manufacturers may find that Windchill ProductPoint alone offers sufficient capabilities to meet their needs for protecting and sharing product data. Windchill ProductPoint benefits companies of all sizes, providing smaller companies with an ideal steppingstone into product lifecycle management (PLM) and giving larger companies with a SharePoint strategy the ability to extend their product development system to broader user communities.
Highlights of Windchill ProductPoint include:
Capabilities
• Multi-CAD SharePoint services offer basic functions for managing Pro/ENGINEER data as well as other CAD file formats, their structures, and inter-relationships
• ProductView™ services enable visual product interaction with 3D thumbnails, visualization of lightweight product viewables, and Web-based markup tools for redlining designs
• Visual navigation and interrogation of files dependencies
• Windchill Portlets present Windchill information (e.g. task lists) to users in a familiar SharePoint portal
• Windchill PLM Connector enables sharing of CAD data across Windchill-based systems in support of customer or supplier collaboration, or internal collaboration among different divisions
Benefits
• Improve efficiency and collaboration through access of engineering content to broader product development teams
• Minimal learning curve, due to familiar Microsoft environment
• Version control offers advantages over network drive-based storage systems and FTP sites, thus enabling effective concurrent engineering
• Leverages the easy and fast deployment characteristics of SharePoint and can be deployed on an existing SharePoint implementation
• Low total cost of ownership since Windchill ProductPoint uses the Windows SharePoint Services infrastructure, which is included with all Microsoft Server solutions
• As a component of the PTC Product Development System, a flexible and scalable configuration of PTC solutions specifically designed and tested to work together, Windchill ProductPoint contributes key capabilities needed for successful product development.
“Windchill ProductPoint enhances Microsoft SharePoint by enabling teams to manage and share structured product development information typically created by CAD and engineering applications," said James Heppelmann, executive vice president and chief product officer, PTC. “Windchill ProductPoint significantly enhances the utility of SharePoint for product development. Smaller companies will find this new solution to be a good entry point for PLM, while larger companies will see the solution as a natural extension to their product development system. Windchill ProductPoint demonstrates PTC’s commitment to providing scalable solutions that help customers of all sizes optimize their product development processes.”
Windchill ProductPoint Availability
Windchill ProductPoint is being announced and demonstrated at the PTC/USER World Event on June 2, 2008. It is expected to be available in CYQ4 2008*. For more information about Windchill ProductPoint, please visit http://www.ptc.com/go/windchillproductpoint.
*The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC’s discretion.
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