Windchill System Administrator's Guide

Maintenance Release, its important to carefully manage your changed files. Be
aware that each time you install a Windchill Service Pack you will have to
manually incorporate any PTC updates into your modified files. For detailed best
practices on managing your site modifications, see the Windchill Solutions R7.0
Maintenance Information paper that is available from the PTC Technical Support
Web site. The remainder of this section gives a brief overview of the Windchill
Service Pack installation process and provides notes on areas where best practices
will be provided.
By carefully managing site modifications following best practices, you can
greatly improve the efficiency of the Windchill Service Pack installation and
decrease production down time. It should be noted that just as in past releases,
PTC recommends that you use a 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.
Installation Process for the Windchill Service Pack
The Windchill Service Pack installation image is the delivery vehicle for updates
to over half of the Windchill 7.0 products, including Windchill Foundation &
PDM, Windchill ProjectLink, Windchill PDMLink, Info*Engine, and Information
Modeler. It also delivers updates to a subset of the Workgroup Managers and
gateway products. For these products, there are updates for both English and
language specific versions. The specific list of products covered is provided
through the documentation accompanying the Maintenance Release.
Updates are cumulative meaning that once a correction has been delivered in one
version of the Windchill Service Pack, it is included in all future versions of the
Windchill Service Pack. Each version of the Windchill Service Pack is identified
with a different datecode.
When the Windchill Service Pack executes 1 , it copies new and updated files from
PTC and performs various housekeeping operations (such as registering the
installation of the updates, propagating XCONF file updates, re-building class
files for enumerations that have changed, re-building client JAR files, and so on).
In order to prevent the Windchill Service Pack installer from simply over-writing
your site-modified files with updates from PTC, the installer runs two modes:
• Preliminary Installation. In the first execution, you can install the Windchill
Service Pack into your test system where you can examine PTC updates and
incorporate them into PTC files that you have modified. On the test system,
you can then validate that the PTC updates, site modifications, and
1. This description applies to when the Windchill Service Pack is executed for the Windchill
Installation directory where the Windchill Method Server is hosted. For other products, the
installer primarily just copies in updated files and there are none of the special processing
regarding site modifications are required.
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