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Understanding Organizations

Organization Administration Overview ......................................................................	140
Typical Duties of Organization Administrators............................................................	141
Out-of-the-box Organization Templates.....................................................................	149
Creating an Organization Context.............................................................................	157
Owning Organization Participants.............................................................................	160
Using the Organization Utilities Page ........................................................................	163
Changing an Established Internet Domain.................................................................	164
Using the OrganizationSync Utility for User Organization Changes .............................	164
Best Practices.........................................................................................................	166

This chapter provides an overview for administering organizations and describes the typical duties that an organization administrator performs. It also provides additional information about some of the main administrative tasks for organizations.

For details on performing many of the tasks described in this section, and

additional information on Organizations , see the Organization Administration Tools online help.

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Organization Administration Overview

Organization administrators are responsible for the configuration and management of an organization within the Windchill system. The organization may represent a business unit of the parent company hosting the Windchill system or it may represent a supplier or partner to the parent company. In an exchange environment, an organization represents a company paying for the ability to create projects.

There are two types of organizations, an organization participant (WTOrganization type) and an organization context.

•An organization participant (made up of an object of type WTOrganization and a directory server LDAP entry) represents a group of users. Each organization participant can be associated with and manage an organization context that allows creation of products, libraries, projects, and programs within that organization.

Not every organization participant should have a corresponding organization context. Only create an organization context if the organization participant has a need to manage its own products, libraries, projects and programs.

Note

Within the user interface, for example within the Policy Administration utility, you may see the current organization participant represented by "This Org", rather than the organization participant’s name.

For more information on organization participants, see Participants (Users,
Groups, and Organizations) on page 251	.

•The organization context is associated with an organization participant, and provides the framework from which other application contexts (products, libraries, projects, and programs) can be created, and organization-level administrative actions can be carried out, as discussed in this chapter.

The development of products and the subsequent management of product information throughout their entire life cycle can be a collaborative process involving a number of organizations, including suppliers, contract manufacturers, and design partners. Windchill uses organization contexts as follows:

•To define your digital product value-chain.

•To define data ownership responsibilities.

•To define the level of engagement that organizations have within your system and business processes.

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All Windchill solutions, when configured, contain an initial organization context. This organization represents your enterprise and is associated with the organization participant created during installation.

In your Windchill solution, organization contexts (and corresponding organization participants) can be created for each of the business organizations or business units that are collaborating together through the Windchill solutions. Each organization inherits templates (document, workflow, and life cycle templates) and has access to user-defined groups defined in the parent site context. You can then define organization-specific templates, user-defined groups, types and roles. A separate group of administrators (the Organization Administrator group) is associated with each organization to manage the organization templates, userdefined groups, and policies. The organization administrator can control who is allowed to create application contexts (products, libraries, projects, and programs) within their organization.

Note

PTC recommends that if you are considering using multiple organization contexts in the future, you should create at least one additional organization context under which your products, libraries, projects, or programs are created, rather than creating them within the initial organization context. This allows you to add additional organizations (participants and contexts) without having to restructure your administrative data (such as subtypes) so that members of one organization cannot see data from another organization.

Windchill solutions provide client user interfaces for doing most activities that are related to administering organizations. Organization administrators define the information that is common across all products, libraries, projects, and programs created within their organization.

This chapter contains information that an organization administrator needs to know, as well as information that a site administrator needs in order to make the organization functional.

Typical Duties of Organization

Administrators

Responsibilities of the organization administrator include the following:

•Managing organization members, groups, roles and shared teams

•Creating, updating, and managing organization folders and documents

•Managing organization-level types and attributes

•Managing organization templates

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•Managing object initialization rules

•Auditing activities within the organization

•Creating and managing profiles

•Creating and managing access control policy rules

•Viewing and managing access control rules for individual objects

•Configuring numbering and versioning schemes

•Monitoring and managing viewable publishing

•Viewing reports

•Importing and exporting information

•Purging, archiving, and restoring jobs

•Managing organization preferences

•Undoing a user checkout

•Creating public information page tabs visible to all users in the organization

Managing Organization Members, Groups, Roles, and Shared Teams

From Organizations , you control the users who can administer the organization (known as organization administrators) using the Administrators page and those who can create and administer application contexts (products, libraries, projects, and programs) using the Creators page.

To enable a user to create products, projects, libraries, or programs, the user must be added to the Product, Project, Library, or Program Creators group for the organization. Only members of the organization can be added to the creators groups. Additionally, organization and site administrators who are members of the organization can create products, libraries, projects, or programs; otherwise, you must be a member of the project creators group to create projects, a member of the program creators group to create programs, a member of the product creators group to create products, or a member of the library creators group to create libraries within the organization.

In Windchill ProjectLink, all members of the organization, by default, are allowed to create projects and administer the projects they create. However, if the organization is set up so that members are not automatically added to the project creators group and empowered to create projects, you must manually add members to the project creators group. Organization members must be manually added to the program creators group in order for them to create a program. Projects are considered the least formal of the application contexts (product, library, project, and program), so it is generally appropriate to allow all users to create and administer a project.

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User-defined groups created at the site and organization level can be used when members create product, library, project, program, and shared teams or when access policies are defined. For example, an organization may want to define userdefined groups for each of the functional teams with membership in the organization. For example, assume that the organization defines a sales and marketing group, an engineering group, a publications group, and a quality control group. These user-defined groups can then be added as members of a product or project team without adding each member individually. Furthermore, when userdefined groups are updated, the updates can be refreshed to update all the teams referencing the user-defined groups without the need for each product or project manager to update their team membership.

For additional information about updating team membership, see Context Teams on page 298 .

Shared teams minimize user administration by allowing a collection of roles and associated participants (a shared team) to be used in many application contexts. Any changes to a shared team are immediately available in the contexts where the shared team is used. By default, the site administrator can create shared teams in any organization context and organization administrators can create shared teams in their organization context. Additionally, on the Creators page, you control who can create shared teams by adding users to the shared team creators group. Adding a user to this group allows the user to create shared teams from the organization

Teams page.

For additional information about creating and managing shared teams, see Shared Teams on page 298 .

An organization inherits the roles defined at the site (as defined in the system roles resource bundle). All the roles from the RoleRB.rbInfo file are displayed on the organization Roles page. Organization administrators can explicitly hide the roles that they do not want their organization to use.

For more information, see Creating an Organization Context on page 157

Creating, Editing, and Managing Organization

Folders and Documents

Organization administrators can create folders, documents, and links in the organization Folders page. The following are examples of the types of documents that administrators might create at the organization level:

•Organization configuration documentation.

•Organization environment change log that captures a record of changes to the organization.

•Organization administration rules and procedures.

•Internal training information for organization administrators.

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