With very large installations of Windchill PDMLink and/or ProjectLink, users passwords are managed by corporate naming services such as Active Directory. With this kind of solutions, you can assign security polices to user password management, like minimum password length, password expiration, dictinaries…
But with no so large installations of Windchill, commonly it is used Aphelion LDAP for managing users and tehir passwords. Aphelion can be used to configure users’ password policies easily installing Aphelion Web Tools module, but interactios with this policies with final users is not useful most of cases.
For example, you can configure in Apehlion a password expiration policy of 2 months for users, so the users must change their passwords before 2 months if he does not want his account locked automatically. But neither Aphelion nor Windchill are able themselves to advice the users about this situation when the password is close to expire.
Prambanan IT Services has designed a simple utility to perform this management, that has these features:
- Customised page in Windchill for password change with the password policies configured in Aphelion.
- Customised page in Windchill for password reset with the new password sent by e-mail.
- E-mails to users about password expirations customisables about design and days before the expiration.
One of the important areas to work for the correct use of Windchill PDMLink and ProjectLink, as well as any other application, is the adequate training of the users. It is not enough to offer courses when they start using the system to get this. Youn need to provide to the users courses, tutorials and manuals on which they can rely to use the multiple posibilities that allow systems such as PDMLink or ProjectLink.
In the case of Windchill, in the upper right of the web pages there is a link called “Learning” providing tutorials and manuals about the OOTB utilities. But as you are creating new and more complex processes in the system, these manuals are not enough for the users.
Therefore, we use tools that allow us to add to these courses, materials specifically generated for processes or developments that are not included in the OOTB version of Windchill and which were created as extensions or customizations of Windchill. These can be manual kind documents in PDF format or HTML, or complex browsing based simulations or demonstrations created in Flash. The first ones are viewed as a video, and the second ones require user intervention, as if they were really using the application.
Obviously, these e-learning courses, not only can be created for Windchill PDMLink or ProjectLink. They can be generated for any application that may require continuous training of users.
One of the common questions from Windchill user is to know where is a document within a Workflow process once it has been launched. In other words, a user creates a document in Windchill PDMLink or ProjectLink, a review Workflow process is launched, and some days after this… who has that document in his Worklist?
The first option to obtain this information is to go through the link “Related Processes” from the properties pages to open the Workflow process of this document and find which is the active element. 
Clicking on it, we will see at the bottom frame the information about the task, as the user who has a task, the date on which he has received it and also a large amount of information that usually is meaningless for the users.
Therefore, we have developed an utility that allows the user to know quickly and easily, who has a task, when did he receive it, who has completed (if the task was designed for multiple users, and it wasrequired the intervention of more than one) from a document in Windchill.
The installation is a breeze, adding to the actions drop-downs of the properties pages an option that will display us a page that shows all of these data. Currently, the utility is applied to WTDocument, EPMDocument, WTPart and objects within the processes of Change Control, in Windchill PDMLink and ProjectLink.
In addition, it shows data of the different review processes (users, date, comments, vote…) by which the document has passed, but without the need of a status change. These data are also accessible through the link “Lifecycle History”, but this OOTB utility shows no data revisions that have taken place in the state in which the document is. Only shows data revisions occurred when a state has been changed in Windchill.
We have created a simple plugin to add Windchill in the Quick Search dropdown menu of Firefox. This way, we can search in Windchill from Firefox directly, without having to browse to the search page of PDMLink or ProjectLink.
For this, we only have to create an XML file and save it in <FIREFOX_INSTALL_DIR>/searchplugins folder, like the one you can download here (PDMLink.xml).
The only necessary change to use it is to replace WINDCHILL_SERVER with the name of your PDMLink / ProjectLink server.
You have more information available about this in the Mozilla Developer Center, where you can find information about how to change the icon for the search item too.
It has been tested with Firefox 2.x and PDMLink / ProjetLink 8.0.
Completing the conversion to PDF implanted in our client, we have developed a system to stamp electronic and digital signatures in PDF files contained in different documents in Windchill. When a user creates the documents from Document Templates defined in PDMLink, they have as primary content MS Office documents created from different templates that are common for documents of a same type within a same product or project in PDMLink.
This way, we can define the exact positions in which to print electronic and/or digital signatures of the different users who comprise in the validation process of each one of those documents. Once the primary content is converted to PDF, the system stamps the electronic and/or digital signature of the user who has completed the task, on the PDF file contained in that document. This stamping is made transparently to the user, so he/she only needs to press the “Task Complete” button in his tasks, and in case of approval its signature (previously scanned) is printed in the primary content that is in PDF format.
The result are PDF files that contains the signatures of the creator and the reviewers of the document through their process in Windchill, being able to include name, user identifier, date and hour of the validation, and even a watermark of the company, that in the case of our client is the logo of its organization.
This process is running in production system since the beginning of 2005.
Distinction between electronic signature and digital signature:
An electronic signature is a stamp of a scanned signature as an image in the PDF file.
The digital signature is applied to the pdf through a Digital Certificate. In the case of our client, those certificates are generated through a PKI, and from a root digital certificate of the organization of our client. In addition, in the case of including an electronic signature, we add the digital signature like visible signature within the PDF, in the same area occupied by the electronic signature. This way, the properties of the digital certificate as well as its validity are accessible over the scanned image of the electronic signature of a concrete user.
At the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005, one of our customers needs to improve the security in some tasks of the Workflow processes in Windchill PDMLink. We were evaluating different possibilities, and decided to add to those tasks a biometric verification of the fingerprint of the users.
We developed a specific page in Windchill to register the fingerprint of all the special users. To get the fingerprint, we use biometric mouses of SecuGen that incorporate a fingerprint sensor in the left side of the mouse.
The sensible tasks for these users, require fingerprint verification, so when the user clicks on the “Task Complete” button, the browser asks to the user to place the fingerprint over the sensor, and the task is completed only if that fingerprint has been registered as the valid fingerprint of the user trying to complete the task.
We have implemented a PDF conversion service in the Workflows developed for one of our customers.
The users create documents in PDMLink from Document Templates that have MS Office files as primary content. When the creator has edited his document, the Workflow process moves it through the approval process of the different reviewers. But before the reception of the document to te reviewers, the process converts the MS Office file contained as primary content to PDF. From this point, the primary content of the document is a PDF file, and the origianl MS Office file is stored as an attachment of the PDMLink document, to be restored as primary content if the creator needs to modify its document (if any of the reviewers rejects it).
The PDF conversion is performed in a different Windows server, so it converts all the details in the MS Office documents as indexes, hyperlinks… and the process does not overload the Windchill servers. This conversion service is in the production environment of one of our customers since 2004, and we have been updating and improving it continuously to have a stable system.
At the moment, most of the documents created in this customer (except CAD documents) have this PDF conversion in their Workflow processes, and one of its principal benefits is the reduction of the files size, helping the users to share information with customers and suppliers. Another advantage of the PDF format is the capability of opening the contents on platform independent web browsers.
