Organization Administration Overview

Organization administrators are responsible for the configuration and management of an organization within the Windchill system. The organization may represent a business unit of the parent company hosting the Windchill system or it may represent a supplier or partner to the parent company. In an exchange environment, an organization represents a company paying for the ability to create projects.

There are two types of organizations, an organization participant (WTOrganization type) and an organization context.

• An organization participant (made up of an object of type WTOrganization and a directory server LDAP entry) represents a group of users. Each organization participant can be associated with and manage an organization context that allows creation of products, libraries, projects, and programs within that organization.

Not every organization participant should have a corresponding organization context. Only create an organization context if the organization participant has a need to manage its own products, libraries, projects and programs.

Within the user interface, for example within the Policy Administration utility, you may see the current organization participant represented by "This Org", rather than the organization participant’s name.

• The organization context is associated with an organization participant, and provides the framework from which other application contexts (products, libraries, projects, and programs) can be created, and organization-level administrative actions can be carried out, as discussed in this chapter.

The development of products and the subsequent management of product information throughout their entire life cycle can be a collaborative process involving a number of organizations, including suppliers, contract manufacturers, and design partners. Windchill uses organization contexts as follows:

All Windchill solutions, when configured, contain an initial organization context. This organization represents your enterprise and is associated with the organization participant created during installation.

In your Windchill solution, organization contexts (and corresponding organization participants) can be created for each of the business organizations or business units that are collaborating together through the Windchill solutions. Each organization inherits templates (document, workflow, and life cycle templates) and has access to user-defined groups defined in the parent site context. You can then define organization-specific templates, user-defined groups, types and roles. A separate group of administrators (the Organization Administrator group) is associated with each organization to manage the organization templates, user-defined groups, and policies. The organization administrator can control who is allowed to create application contexts (products, libraries, projects, and programs) within their organization.

PTC recommends that if you are considering using multiple organization contexts in the future, you should create at least one additional organization context under which your products, libraries, projects, or programs are created, rather than creating them within the initial organization context. This allows you to add additional organizations (participants and contexts) without having to restructure your administrative data (such as subtypes) so that members of one organization cannot see data from another organization.

Windchill solutions provide client user interfaces for doing most activities that are related to administering organizations. Organization administrators define the information that is common across all products, libraries, projects, and programs created within their organization.

This chapter contains information that an organization administrator needs to know, as well as information that a site administrator needs in order to make the organization functional.