Key Considerations
This topic describes information access, methodologies, and activities that you perform to deploy and configure Windchill+. In addition, this topic also covers certain prerequisites.
Access
• You do not have access to the backend part of your Windchill servers on any PTC hosted Windchill+ environment. The backend access is available on local development environments only, as a developer hosted virtual machine (VM) or cloud portal hosted virtual machine.
• You have access to the frontend part of the integration environment including the Org and Site Admin level utilities pages.
• Administrative access is limited to the Org level utilities pages for the QA and production environments. This access should be considered as view-only. Use this access primarily for troubleshooting and monitoring purposes only. You have access to different Org-level utilities depending on the environment.
Methodologies
• PTC allows to deploy a build package only using the automated build deployment process.
• Automated build deployment only accepts one packaging methodology, called CCD (Configuration and Code deployment).
• The CCD utility is installed and shipped with PTC Windchill PDMLink. For more information, see Deploying Code and Configuration Package.
• The system uses the Business Administrative Change (BAC) framework to capture, export, and import business configurations. To be promoted, the BAC package must be included in the CCD package.
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CCD is the only deployment methodology.
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The BAC package must include all configurations and must combine all workstreams (cumulative) within a given time frame according to the release cadence and schedule. For more information, see Importing a BAC Package Using CCD Utility.
• PTC does not recommend using the BAC to manage your Containers ACLs.
• The LoadFromFile framework is recommended instead. The LoadFromFile is supported within the CCD package. For more information, see CCD Package Structure.
Activities
• All projects must start with Data Modelling activity using the Type and Attribute Manager.
Data modelling is an object type and attribute strategy.
• On your development environment, develop your data model and publish it to the integration environment using the automated deployment.
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You must validate all the CCD packages before submitting them to the automated build service. It is recommended that you set up the following two development environments:
• A source development environment where the changes are implemented.
• A target development environment for testing whether the CCD package can be deployed. For more information, see the deploy target section in External Targets.
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• For configuration management, you must create a BAC package after each successful functional acceptance testing (FAT). You, as a customer or partner, must plan to store these packages on your source code management (SCM). The BAC package includes the data model and is the starting point to onboard new developers or to refresh the local development environment.
• Once a BAC package is available on the integration environment, developers are allowed to perform minor tweaks from the UI.
• All developments must be done in a local development environment. For example, a local virtual machine or a cloud portal.
• CCD must be used in the development environment to prepare, build, and deploy.
• PTC does not recommend managing individual container configuration in your development environment. For example, a product or project.
• Some containers might be created to create a container template.
• Use the container-level configuration with caution in QA and production environments.