Understanding Maintenance Releases

The Windchill Service Pack or a Critical Patch Set (CPS) and a regular Windchill release work in the same way, though their contents are different as mentioned in the section Maintenance Releases, Major Releases, and Patches. They contain updates for Windchill solutions, as well as a subset of the other Windchill product modules.

As mentioned in Using Both Test and Production Systems, PTC recommends that you use the separate test system to prepare and validate the updates before installing them into production. This will help ensure minimal downtime during the installation into the production system. It is also advisable to perform a backup of the product installation directory prior to performing the installation.

When you execute the PTC Solution Installer, it first determines which files should be installed onto your system. It does this by locating the directories that contain the Windchill products to be updated. After you select an installation to update, the installer determines which products are installed and what datecode versions are already present. This results in the following behavior:

• If the selected installation contains products for which there are no updates, no updates are installed.

• If the PTC Solution Installer detects that the current release of a Windchill product has already been partially installed in a selected installation, by default the installer does not reinstall the updated files; however, you are presented with an option to recover the installation.

• The installer only updates locale-specific resources on your system if it finds that those locales were previously installed and registered through an installation of the Windchill MultiLanguage Pack.

These features are intended to minimize the time it takes to install the maintenance release or point release. In particular, this avoids re-installing updates to site-modified files when you have previously incorporated those changes, or reinstalling updates to Windchill products that have already been completed. To ensure that the latest site-modified files are used, the files in the siteMod directory are redeployed each time you run the PTC Solution Installer using Update Existing Installation.

Depending on what products have been installed and how they are deployed across your computer network, you may need to run the installer against multiple directories on the same computer or on multiple computers.