Managing and tracking Teamcenter administrative data across multiple environments was never easy. Companies have relied on a wide variety of solutions for this – from manual process-based solutions like cheat sheets to automated custom build scripts to wrap numerous Siemens administrative utilities together. Some companies had a great deal of success in establishing a corporate standard Teamcenter environment from scratch using custom solutions; even for them, however, tracking the changes to admin data inside their Teamcenter environments or comparing admin data between different environments was a very tedious process. Not anymore, with the new set of admin data management capabilities Siemens introduced with Teamcenter 11.2

Now, we can easily perform the following four broad scenarios on nine types of administrative data (Access Manager rules, Organization data, Preferences, Projects, Revision rules, Saved queries, Style sheets, Subscriptions and Workflows), both in UI-based Teamcenter Environment Manager (TEM) and command line utilities modes.

1.      Analyzing how administration data is configured in any environment

A detailed administrative data report can be generated for any Teamcenter environment with all nine admin categories or with a few selected categories, or even a partial set from a specific category based on the filter set. These reports are static HTML reports and don’t have a live connection to the Teamcenter environment. These reports can be used to:

• Document and review admin data configurations of any environment
• Troubleshoot issues with any configuration
• Include with IR for GTAC analysis of problems
• Use for periodic reviews of production environments
• Use as environment hand-off document
• Use as a training document
• Use to capture snapshots of admin data configurations at specific points in time

2.      Copying entire administration data or a subset from one environment to another

We can export administration data from one site and import it to another. This is very useful when we must ensure that one environment is configured the same as another, such as a test or training environment. We can also set up teams to work on specific parts of the administrative data in different test environments and then export only the administration data that changed from that environment. We can then consolidate the changes made by different teams by importing all of the administration data from multiple export packages into one environment. During the import, a dry run mode is also available, and it generates a detailed Java doc style report after import describing what changed. The tool also provides five broad categories for conflict resolution and merge during the import, but there is no graphical interface yet for manually overriding specific admin data.

3.      Comparing administration data between two sites

We can generate a report that compares the administration data from a source site to a target site. This can help us to determine the cause of differences in site behavior, determine the differences between customer environment and out of the box Teamcenter environment, quickly check if a new environment established using custom scripts is configured the same as a reference environment, or to see what is common and what is different between sites during a site consolidation effort.

4.      Tracking the impacts to an environment as administration data is imported over time

We can quickly determine when a particular change was introduced using a site’s administration data import history report. This report is automatically generated and maintained upon each successful import to a site.

These new capabilities are part of Siemens’ efforts to reduce the Teamcenter cost of ownership and help companies reduce IT costs through:

• Setup environments becoming faster by automation instead of manual steps
• Quicker learning curves by standardized and automated documentation
• Easier bundling of admin data with software bundles
• Faster troubleshooting

Siemens hasn’t deprecated any existing admin data utilities with the introduction of these new tools. All custom solutions using existing utilities should continue to work as is. The new tools use TCXML and closure rules behind the scenes, so it brings all related business objects used with admin data as a complete package as defined in the closure rules.

Do you have any questions about the new Teamcenter capabilities? Leave a comment and we’ll help you.