One of the questions I get often is, "So, what's better or more valuable in Pro/INTRALINK that is important to my company?" In my last blog, I talked about some concept enhancements for managing information versus Pro/INTRALINK 3.x. A natural follow-up topic is about revisioning in Pro/INTRALINK or PDMLink, another important building block when thinking about how to manage your company designs.

One question I hear often is "We've been using file-based revision sequences in Pro/INTRALINK 3.x to manage our revisioning approach. Can we continue to use this.?"

In the next generation of Pro/INTRALINK, several valuable enhancements have been made to make it easier for companies to manage these processes. First, if you remember in Pro/INTRALINK 3.x, a company could create a file that contained one or more sequences, but unfortunately, Pro/INTRALINK 3.x only understood these sequences as one set. Secondly, all items managed in Pro/INTRALINK 3.x followed the same revisioning behavior - whether they were a marketing document, material specification, Pro/E design, or QA test plan.

Flexible Revision Sequences
With Pro/INTRALINK 8.0 and 9.0, you now have several more flexible options. First of all, you can setup a file that contains one, two, or more 'types' of sequences. For example, one type could be "Alpha" (A, B, C, etc.) and a second sequence type could be "Numeric" (1, 2, 3, etc.). Any values can be entered for these sequences - the values are used in the order they appear in the file.

A key benefit of defining multiple sequence types is that you may choose the type of revision sequence used for each type of information managed in Pro/INTRALINK for each Product or Library context - so that Pro/E drawings could be labeled with "Alpha" and functional specifications could be labeled with "Numeric". And, if you move directly to PDMLink, you can also setup Part designs to use a more elaborate approach.

Another valuable addition is that these version sequences are assigned to life cycle states, so when a design is updated or revised, the system helps you follow your business processes more closely. For example, a Revise action of a version 1 Pro/E drawing in 'In Work' will be version 2, and the first Revise of the same Pro/E drawing in 'Pre-Production' will go from 2 to A. Once an item starts a new sequence, naturally, it does not return to the previous sequence, regardless of its life cycle state.

Configuring the behavior of "Revise"
Lastly, you can now easily configure the behavior of Revise for each item type so that when you revise a Pro/E drawing that is 'In Work', the new version is created in 'In Work' and when you revise the same drawing that is in the 'Production' state - the new version is created in 'Pre-production' state (instead of In Work state) if you desire. The benefit is less work for the design team - no need to do the 'demote' action when creating a new version.

What do you think about these enhancements? Let us know in the Getting Started forum.

Next time I'll talk more about other enhancements around design reviews and the Pro/INTRALINK RTP process.

James Gehan
Vice President Product Management for Windchill PDMLINK, PTC