About Projects and Programs

A project context is a web-based space into which you invite people to collaborate as a project team. Team members, such as engineers, engineering managers, product managers, and even suppliers, can access the project space, using it to find, store, and share documents, CAD files, links to important Web pages, or other information. Team members can mark up and view CAD files, create new iterations of an existing part or document, and route files to other team members for review or approval. Team members assigned to the project manager role can create a schedule, or plan, for the project, as well as assign project deliverables to team members. A project manager can also schedule team meetings and host online project discussions. For more information on projects, see About Projects.

For information on the pages that appear when you expand a project or program, see Context Pages.

For information on accessing projects or programs, see Viewing Contexts.

Project templates allow you to create new projects based on a pre-defined folder structure, user roles, and so on. Administrators can create new project templates from an existing project by saving or exporting the project as a template. Administrators can also save an existing project as a new project, copying those objects such as folder structure, team roles, and deliverables that they wish to retain.

Projects and project templates from earlier versions of Windchill can coexist among projects and project templates created in Windchill 10.0. These earlier versions of projects and project templates are referred to as classic projects and classic project templates within Windchill 10.0. For more information on the functional differences, see Converting Plan Types.

A program provides a central area to link together information, people, and plans for a series of related projects.

Outside of program-level documents, the majority of information and activities associated with a program are managed in individual projects. The program is the central navigation point that teams can use to search or navigate to information that may be part of a program, but is managed in other contexts. You can build a network of related information for a program and create several types of relationship bi-directional links to information such as projects, parts, CAD documents, and dynamic documents. The following document features are not available for programs: