Many product initiatives require collaboration. Often this occurs within a co-located team or among users within a single Windchill installation, but sometimes help is required from an external collaboration partner.

Windchill offers multiple collaboration tools. If you have Windchill PDMLink and Windchill ProjectLink installed, you can share an object to a particular project, which provides access for collaboration partners authorized to access your Windchill system. When collaboration partners are not granted authorization or are granted limited authorization to your Windchill system, Windchill packages may provide the necessary collaboration capabilities.

In Windchill, a package is a collection of related objects that you want to send to a recipient for use outside of your Windchill solution. Windchill supports configurable delivery options to meet your external collaboration requirements. Windchill supports the ability to create a package delivery in two different formats:

These formats can be delivered to the recipient in different manners. If the recipient has access to your Windchill system, you can share data to a project or email a link to the delivery. Delivery options outside of your Windchill installation allow you to email attachments, manually transfer the files to an externally accessible download site, or download the files onto physical media. In addition to providing delivery medium options, Windchill packages provide options for using the offline viewer, a manifest file, or no manifest file. If you have Windchill Aerospace and Defense installed, you can create a CDRL or SDRL package, which allows for additional attributes associated with government contracts. For more information, see About CDRLs and SDRLs and Windchill Aerospace and Defense.

In addition to being used for collaboration with external partners, Windchill packages can be used to replicate product design data within internal Windchill sites. For this application, a different type of package, called a replication package, is available. A replication package gathers the product design data from within a product or library context. The data in a replication package is then replicated in second internal system. A more detailed level of metadata considered necessary for internal purposes is maintained in the target system.

Depending on the type of collaboration in which you are participating and your role, you can choose to follow one of several process flows. These flows are introduced in Packages: Sending Side and Packages: Receiving Side.