The Windchill Gateway for FORAN exports entities in FORAN and imports them into Windchill PDMLink. Users continue to use Windchill Gateway for FORAN as their daily data management tool. The Windchill Gateway for FORAN also allows for published entities edited in Windchill to be sent back to FORAN for further development work.

Data files and content (though not primary CAD files), are published from FORAN into Windchill for enterprise visibility, visualization, technical publications, and manufacturing planning, including the following information:

This implementation allows users to keep data and core design processes in FORAN while Windchill supports enterprise product development activities.

The gateway is a common infrastructure (controller, message oriented middleware, and gateway adapters) to describe, execute, and control a business process. It integrates disparate business logic running in separate processes into a harmonized, orchestrated process. In this specific implementation, it allows the exchange of part structures from FORAN into Windchill PDMLink. The execution of a process is handled through a set of messages that flow between the controllers and the adapters. The controller provides a single point administering of the business processes that are run by the gateway.

The user interface allows a new instance of the business process to be created by identifying endpoints at which operations of the process run, and also identifies the task that constitutes the business logic of the step. Diagnostics are available to monitor progress of a running process instance.

The Gateway Architecture is the core for publishing data from FORAN to Windchill. It executes the following steps as part of publishing process:

After configuring the publishing process, execution of the process becomes automatic. See Overview of the Publishing Process.

Users for the Windchill Gateway for FORAN are: