Training on a shoestring

Do yourself a favor. If you are involved in ProE or PTC training for your company, download and review this presentation. Lots of nice resources and maybe some new ideas for you to try.

Pro|E Core

I hope everybody appreciates that I am using the "" instead of the "/" for ProE. Brian Thompson did a bang up job on the ProE core PUP. He went into greater detail on some of the things John covered in the road map & then some.

• Sheetmetal mirror and pattern. We have all been there before and now we have it.


• All the new sketcher tools including some nice constraint tools.


• Geometry pattern. This is like a built in version of the surface copy, pattern, and solidify trick.


• UV patterns, or patterning to a contour like an industrial designer would.


• UDF including a nice auto-place trick.


• A peek behind the curtain on future build enhancements.

Pro|ENGINEER Roadmap

John (Bushie) Buchowski took on the ProENGINEER roadmap in today's second session. The metrics on Wildfire 5.0 indicate it is the highest quality initial release in PTC's history. This is welcome news for those of us contemplating a move to 5.0.
Some of the things to look forward to in 5.0:

• Dynamic editing
• No foreced resolve mode
• Pick & place UDFs
• New ribbon interface in detailing
• New cabling and welding UIs
• Drawing Tree
• Point patterns

Starting things off

The keynote address featured a full line up of PTC management. Dick Harrison, Jim Heppleman & Brian Shepard. There was some interesting corporate information as well as new and scheduled product launches.

Corporate strategy falls into four main focus items.

• Solving important customer problems
• Technology leadership
• Being a stable predictable business
• Efficient operations

Jim spoke to this in his new position as acting CEO. Dick is moving to the position of chairman of the board. Brian talked about some interesting pending product launches including:

• Windchill PPMLink for program portfolio management
• MathCAD Prime 1.0, a large overhaul of the traditional interface to a new paradigm of usability.

Some of the tings we can look forward to in the future are automated interference detection in Winchill 10.0. Notice that was not in Pro/E, but inside Windchill using ProductView data. In addition "Project Lightning" was mentioned. This is described as the CAD roadmap of the next 20 years. The goal is to put to bed some longstanding issues in all CAD platforms dealing with usability, interoperability and large assembly management. Look for a webcast explaining more on October 28th.

Blogging with two thumbs

I am going to see how much, if any, you can blog via an iPhone. We'll see how well I can pull this off. First setback is no pictures... Looks like laptop time will be required to add photos later.
Now with photos! The turn out has been great considering the economy.