I suppose a second question is, "why talk about it here on a Pro/INTRALINK blog?" It turns out there is a tighter link than you might imagine.

With Pro/ENGINEER, PTC invented the concept of parametric, associative, and component-based design. This flexibility liberated engineers and designers, who could stop redrawing after each tweak and instead easily iterate through many different design parameters (thanks to "parametric"), quickly update their drawings and deliverables (thanks to "associativity"), and reuse their intellectual property many times over (thanks to "component-based" and again to "parametric"). The result was great increases in productivity, leading more than 40,000 companies to date to adopt Pro/ENGINEER. The gain was so great that every CAD competitor either rewrote their software in an attempt to copy the Pro/ENGINEER approach, or died trying.

While this approach produced great productivity gains, it also created some complex data management challenges. Monolithic drawing files went out the door with the old CAD system, and in their place came large structures of individual files, all separately modifiable, and structured into a myriad of configurations. Pro/INTRALINK entered the picture, giving companies a robust way to manage the power of Pro/ENGINEER.

It turns out that manufactured products need a lot of documentation beyond 3D models, drawings, and toolpaths. Especially for more sophisticated products, somebody needs to document work instructions for the factory floor, installation instructions at the customer site, operations instructions for user/operator, plus service and maintenance instructions, training manuals, regulatory submissions, and spare parts catalogs. Imagine if it were easy to reuse Pro/ENGINEER data in these publications and manage these documents like a Pro/ENGINEER assembly so that the publications could be regenerated after changes to designs or descriptions. This approach would rock the world of technical publications just like Pro/ENGINEER did to the world of CAD! That's exactly where Arbortext fits in.

There are two main products in the Arbortext family. The first is called Arbortext Editor. I like to describe it by saying it looks like Microsoft Word, but works like Pro/ENGINEER. With Arbortext Editor, a document becomes an assembly of reusable XML (and Pro/ENGINEER) components. The second product is the Arbortext Publishing Engine, which is used to assemble the document components together and produce a complete document which can be published in PDF and HTML formats. Arbortext Publishing Engine is very analogous to the "regenerate" function in Pro/ENGINEER, in that it assembles the latest or most appropriate XML and Pro/ENGINEER components at each level in the structure, so the document is very dynamic and associative.

What does this all have to do with Pro/INTRALINK? Well, it turns out that the very same code we wrote to manage Pro/ENGINEER files and file structures in Windchill PDMLink and Pro/INTRALINK is being used to manage Arbortext document structures in Windchill PDMLink. So one of the great benefits of upgrading Pro/INTRALINK is that it puts you on the path to dynamic publishing, and a whole new revolution in productivity!