Jeff, I used Pro/E in my day job too from about 1996 till I retired 9 years ago. Things have changed a bit, I think.

The latest version I used was 2000i …. we received Wildfire but we (I actually) elected not to switch to it at that time because we had a very tight schedule and the learning curve for the switch to Wildfire was much worse than for previous updates. Not the least of it was the the change to the model manipulation (rotate/pan/zoom) buttons and keys. I hadn't realised just how second-nature that had become until then. On top of that, I knew I would be retiring within a year so it was easy to leave the migration to Wildfire to the next guy

We were serviced (in Canada) by a local outfit which also did in person training courses(and were good at it). You could also pay them for 1-on-1 training on site if you wanted. They were also our primary help desk. They were quite close by and, if necessary would drop by to see the problem in situ.

Sounds like that's changed quite a lot. I'm a bit surprised their customer service seems to have fallen off …. They have a lot more competition these days.

I actually still have an old copy of 2000i (with licence) that I use at home for my workshop projects. I hope that the latest version is more intuitive and less user hostile than the earlier versions.

Hi Sid,

Yes, the learning curve for Wildfire was extremely steep for very little benefit. It was primarily driven by PTC marketing to make the user interface or "front end" look and feel more like their major competitor Solidworks, and make the menu picks work more like Windows. Behhind the new user interface, the old style (and rock solid) ProE menu driven CAD was running just the same as always.

With Creo they have stared to change the underlying software in addition to changing the user interface to ribbon style selection system, to make it more like Windows 7 etc. Again though, users have to put up with another major change to the user interface and again the learning curve is steep. Again we have much lost time and productivity to learn a new front end imposed by a software company. There is some increased functionality, but also some major financial traps with the maintenance costs for the many "apps" that are offered. In many cases several extra "apps" are needed to do what one module of Wildfire did. The difference is that each app carries a yearly maintenance cost. If you had a "Foundation XE" Wildfire licence the maintenance used to be about $1500 per year. Now, to get the full functionality of that licence you would need 2 extra apps so you pay $1500 x 3 or $4500 maintenance. (or that is what the VARS are trying to get away with. The info on what is included functionality and what is not is very vague, no one seems to know in detail. I am using the basic Creo license and have found a ton of stuff I could do is missing, but I can't find out what "app" modules the missing stuff is in for sure. It is early days for Creo as I said.

My general opinion is that I like ProE very much, Creo not so much, but I really hate the way PTC (the parent corporation) does things. I am not a fan of tyhe VARS either.

In the 1990's, training and support from a company called Rand Worldwide out of Mississauga Ontario was great. The training from the VARS now is not too solid, generally. Rand is no longer a VAR for ProE, although they do offer some ProE training at HUGE costs. I usually hire a couple of ex-Rand guys who have kept current with ProE for training these days. They are generally excellent quality trainers and charge about a quarter of what the VARs do. Torgon and BRT are no longer ProE VARs either. TriStar still are, but their sales practices are iffy. There is NO local help desk anymore.

2000i was the last great rev of ProE before Wildfire. I could make 2000i sing, and was never more productive than I was working in 2000i. Nowadays I have a daily fistfight with ProE products to reach decent productivity, due to piss poor front end interface software and hidden or lost functionality.

It was a running joke among long time ProE users that we would bet on the fact that the end of the world would happen sooner than implementation of enhancement requests. I had many ER's that were filed 1993-2001 which I never heard another word about, and I have since found out that many of these were seconded or duplicated by thousands of users. As an example I requested in 1993 that commonly used shapes be included in the sketcher menu, like hexagons, round ended slots, keyhole shapes, etc. rather than just lines arcs circles and rectangles. I recently found out that some of the other/extra shapes have been implemented on Wildfire 5, released dec 2011. The stats published on one user site said that this enhancement had been requested 230,500 times since 1993. 18 years for PTC to do it. This lack of response for ER's really put a bad taste in many people's mouths. PTC is now listening more to users, but for a very long time they just did not care, except for big customers with hundreds or thousands of seats of ProE. That bus left the station a long time ago, and many users are now single seat or two seat customers. -end of rant- JD