Basic Customization > Windchill Customization Basics > Windchill+ Guidelines and Guardrails
  
Windchill+ Guidelines and Guardrails
The Windchill+ solution is designed to be fast and easy to use. It offers several ways to meet your business needs. It provides a strategic way to monitor, track, and manage people, information, and processes at every phase in the lifecycle of the product from the planning phase to the product retirement. The out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality provides pre-defined options and is available immediately after the installation process is complete.
* 
Before you proceed with the customization:
Evaluate the business value versus introducing an additional system complexity.
Ensure that the process you choose minimizes complexity and streamlines the system upgrades.
For detailed information about the supported customizations, see Allowed Customizations.
* 
The changes that you make directly using administrative utilities on instances hosted by PTC, cannot be promoted by PTC. Such changes will not be retained during upgrade.
Guidelines
Follow these guidelines for creating customizations :
1. Security Customization Guidelines — It is recommended that you emulate these customizations in isolation.
2. Extend the customization based on the PTC customizations that are currently supported by PTC. For more information, see Allowed Customizations
3. Release management
a. Service owners (for example, Project or Product Managers) should maintain a roadmap to guide the evolution of their PLM implementation based on relevant business objectives.
b. Changes to your Windchill+ system should be managed under a formal release process that aligns those changes to your PLM roadmap.
4. Validate all the customizations using test cases.
5. Use the latest methodologies for customization. For example,
a. Modelled enumerations
b. Text tailoring