Legacy Windchill license renewals will end after September 30, 2026. This announcement from PTC follows the news that support for Windchill version 13 ends in June 2027 (version 12 support ended in 2024). For engineering and IT leaders, this deadline represents far more than just a routine software upgrade. It's a strategic inflection point that demands a clear decision - and soon. Whether your organization has relied on Windchill for two years or twenty, the path forward requires careful planning. Here's what you need to understand about your options, the risks of waiting, and how to approach this transition with confidence.
SOLIDWORKS Manage provides greater flexibility than we’ve known with just PDM in terms of exporting data. We’ve previously covered exporting record item data, so now we’ll extend that by including BOM data. When exporting BOM information, we’re limited to a number of fields for the child along with all properties from the parent.
In this article, we’ll walk through the steps to properly restore a SOLIDWORKS Manage instance with an already restored PDM vault. SOLIDWORKS Manage has multiple parts, much like PDM; we’ll walk through the steps to restore them from backup. Restoring the database requires access to SQL through Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and the credentials that will allow us to restore a database from backup. Typically this is the ‘sa’ account.
We hope we never need backups, but it is certainly a possibility that we may have to use them at some point. Here we’ll explore the process of backing up SOLIDWORKS Manage. Creating a backup of the database requires that we have access to the server through Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Backups can be taken through this program manually or on a schedule.
Upgrading a SOLIDWORKS Manage instance isn’t difficult if you follow the correct steps. In this guide, we walk through the process to get you moving forward. Before starting any major change to the environment, all files should be checked into Manage and PDM. No users should be attempting to work in PDM nor Manage until the server upgrade has been completed.
SOLIDWORKS Manage allows us to get a snapshot of data about records in the form of reports. Configuring these reports can seem like a daunting task... until you dive in. In this article, we’ll explore some of the available options for creating a simple report in SOLIDWORKS Manage.
SOLIDWORKS Manage gives us greater flexibility than we’ve known with just PDM in terms of exporting data. One place where this is visible is in the ability of Manage to export record data to XML. In this article, we explore exporting data from a single record as XML from SOLIDWORKS Manage.
SOLIDWORKS Manage can pull information from sources other than PDM. We’ll explore importing records from an SQL database from one table and updating the information from another. To start the process, create a link to an additional database. To do this, open the System Administration in SOLIDWORKS Manage and go to Data Sources.
SOLIDWORKS Manage and SOLIDWORKS PDM were made to get along and work together. To do this, a PDM add-in must be installed. The process for this is fairly simple but worth noting some steps that will be specific to every install. The PDM add-in doesn’t come in a convenient package for us to drag and drop into the vault.