Overview of Windchill Participants

Windchill uses the term participant to mean a user, group, or an organization; it includes any combination of users, groups, or organizations.

As the Windchill system administrator for any Windchill solution, you can create and update Windchill user, group, and organization objects through the Participant Administration utility. As an Organization Administrator, you can update the Windchill user, group, and organization objects that are in your organization context.

When a Windchill solution is installed, the system administrative user (Administrator), the system administrative group (Administrators), and the initial organization object are always created. By default, the user Administrator (for example, wcadmin) belongs to the Administrators group. This user does not have an organization affiliation (as defined by the LDAP organization attribute, which is "o" by default).

Windchill uses both the Windchill database and a directory service when creating participants. For each participant, there is an entry in a directory service and a Windchill object stored in the database:

• The directory service entry contains attributes specific to the type of participant. For example, user entries have attributes for the user’s full name, email address, and organization.

The Windchill Directory Server is set up when your Windchill solution is installed. Other directory services can be established by setting up JNDI adapter entries through the Info*Engine Property Administrator and adding the adapter entries to the wt.federation.org.directoryServices property value.

• The Windchill object contains information that is relevant to Windchill (such as the associated domain) and the Unique Federation Identifier (UFID) associated with participant.

The UFID contains the distinguished name of the participant and identifies the directory service where the participant entry resides.

If the LDAP directory server is read-only, edit and create actions are not available for participants and Windchill uses existing LDAP entries as participants.