You use Creo. You love the power of designing parametrically, and you know that nothing beats Creo’s breadth of capability, perfectly constrained models, and amazing performance. But you also probably spend a lot of time managing Creo files. We can help with that.
GrabCAD Workbench has always supported Creo, but we recently made a number of improvements to Workbench to make it an even better PDM system for Creo. Creo has some unique quirks (as all Creo users know) - for example, it puts a number extension at the end of every file so it never overwrites data. The first file it saves gets a “.prt.1” extension, the second “.prt.2,” etc. When working on decent-sized assemblies, your working folders quickly start to overflow with files.
The good news is that Workbench understands Creo files, and handles them gracefully. First, let’s take a look at what happens when you upload some files on the web:
Notice how we’re skipping old versions and naming every version to “.1.” That way, the shared version on Workbench always has a consistent naming scheme. Creo’s not designed to keep different number extensions in sync across computers, so we default to .1 in all cases. That’s the best possible way to share Creo files with external users.
But what about PDM and internal collaboration? Before we get into the file management details, it’s important to point out an important feature of Creo: Workbench runs inside it:
Yes, since the days of Pro/E Wildfire, Creo has provided users with an integrated web browser, and it runs Workbench superbly, including the 3D view. That means that you can use all of Workbench’s capabilities, including previewing files, locking files, and even releasing files, all without changing windows.
For daily use, the GrabCAD’s desktop application also speaks Creo. It automatically pulls the latest file from the long list of files, uploading the final one. When getting updates, Workbench does exactly what Creo would do: it creates a new file with a higher version number than any existing one.
What about drawings? Manufacturing files? Layouts? Workbench manages them correctly. Configurations are supported via Creo’s instance accelerators, and Workbench can even display all of their previews.
