• Managing Users—Must be performed at the organization level.

• Managing Products and Libraries—Recommended to be performed at the organization level.

• Managing the Promotion Process—Performed at the organization levels. See applicable section below for details.

• Managing CAD Application—Performed at the site or organization level, depending on the specific task. See applicable section below for details.

• Configuring a Remote CAD Worker for Autodesk Inventor and SolidWorks—Must be performed at the site level.

• Products—A product is typically thought of as the physical item manufactured and sold to customers. Windchill expands the concept of a product to include the environment in which users collaborate to develop that end item part. This environment is known as the product context.

• Libraries—A library provides a place for storing and providing access to commonly used objects that are shared across multiple products. Libraries correspond to your company's organization and processes. For example, standard hardware files, that are controlled by industry standards and that CAD Authors have read-only access to, can be shared and associated with multiple products. This environment is known as the library context.

• Single Product Context—Create a single product context for all products and projects. Each product or project is created as a sub-folder within the main product context.

◦ Easier to manage and navigate

◦ Easier to collect and share related information that crosses products

• Product Context for Each Product/Project—Create a product context for each product or project.

◦ More flexible—If you do project engineering work, it is often easiest to manage each project using a separate product context where you can configure the folders and team roles uniquely for each project. You can also define attributes for each product or project (such as customer name, project number, start date, delivery date, and status) and create reports that are specific to the project.

◦ More scalable—If you have a very large number of products or projects, you may find it difficult to navigate and to search among the items in a single product context and you may find that opening the folders page for a single context is slow (such as when you have hundreds of top-level folders representing projects). Creating a product context for each product or project makes navigation and searching easier when there is a large number of products or projects.

◦ Easier to control access—If you need to separately control access to each product or project, it is usually easier to accomplish when you use separate project contexts (with separate teams) than with a single product context.

• Teams—Products and libraries have teams, the members of which are assigned to roles that define their privileges within the context. A product or library team can consist of a local team, a shared team, or both. Windchill PDM Essentials includes an out-of-the-box product template and an out-of-the-box library template, each with a corresponding shared team. It is recommended that these templates are used for creating new products and libraries.

• Modifying Access Control—As an administrator, you must ensure that only the appropriate participants have access to objects, such as documents and CAD documents. Decisions about access rights are expressed as access control rules. Access control is configured based on the Windchill PDM Essentials out-of-the-box groups and life cycle states.

◦ Security Management—The Edit Access Control action provides a mechanism to view and manipulate access control permissions on individual objects (such as documents, CAD documents, and folders).

◦ Policy Administration—The Policy Administration utility is used to manage administrative domains and the access control, indexing, and notification policies for those domains. An administrative domain is an area that defines a set of administrative policies. A policy is a collection of rules for types of objects within a domain.

• Life Cycle States—An organization administrator from the Administrator group or a user in the Manager group/role can create a variety of life cycles or modify existing life cycles. These life cycles define the states and transitions associated with various business objects and the available transitions between those states.

• Set State Actions—For information on the procedure of changing the state of an object, see Setting the State of an Object

• Promotion Requests—You can use the promotion request processes to formally request a state change for a set of objects that reside in products or libraries.