Managing Promotion Processes in Windchill PDMLink
The decision to promote an object from one state to another often pertains to a business decision. As such, it is important to make sure that products and libraries are set up to allow for the proper approvals to be obtained prior to promotion. For more information, see
Understanding Products and Libraries.
For any process template used in the promotion process, users assigned to the particular tasks are obtained from the following:
• The process template itself (the process has a member defined for a specific task)
• The state of the life cycle of the promotion request
• The team instance of the promotion request
The out-of-the-box templates do not define users for the roles defined in the process templates or life cycle templates used by the promotion request.
The team template provided for the promotion request defines the roles
Approver and
Reviewer; however, no default users are assigned to these roles. These roles should be populated by the context team. For more information, see
Teams.
If you are using a process template for the promotion process that defines roles in addition to Approver and Reviewer, add the roles to the team template used for promotion request creation. You can modify team templates through the Team Administration utility found on the Utilities page for each context. Create a copy of the team template (using the Save As functionality), edit the new template to add any new roles, and then modify the appropriate object initialization rule for the promotion request to point to the new team template in the appropriate context.
The primary method for allocating users to roles is by using the context team. You can find the team on the
Team page of
Products
or
Libraries
. Both out-of-the-box product templates define two context roles,
Promotion Approvers and
Promotion Reviewers, to work with the promotion process. These context team roles, along with role mapping, copy any users and user-defined groups from these roles into the team instance of the promotion request at creation.
When a new product is created, the Promotion Approvers role is empty; any approval tasks are sent to the promotion request creator unless this role (or another mapping) is properly defined. For each product, resolve at least one user into the promotion request team instance for the Approver role to ensure that a proper approval is obtained prior to promotion. Out-of-the-box, this can be done in the following ways:
• Adding the user to the Promotion Approvers role of the context team
• Modifying the team template to have a default participant for the Approver role
• Modifying the preference mapping to add additional roles for the Approver role, ensuring that at least one user is assigned to at least one of the roles in the context team.