This may be more detailed than what you are looking for.
I have worked at a couple of companies that used Windchill to control SolidWorks files. Windchill is a very cantankerous behemoth. Plan to delete workspaces and cache regularly. There is almost nothing intuitive about using Windchill. USERS WILL REQUIRE DETAILED TRAINING AND NEED CHEAT SHEETS TO REFER BACK TO.
Is Windchill being used to control the BOMs and release of everything, basically PLM? Does the company you merged with have written procedures for how to use Windchill? Try to look over them as soon as possible to start forming questions based on how they are using Windchill.
I worked at one company that had a bunch of independent design groups around the world. Several of those groups used ProE/Creo (I don't remember if this was before the name change). They pushed us to use Windchill assuring us that we were not the only group that would be doing this. That was probably in 2014 or so. We were the only group trying to use Windchill for our SolidWorks files. It was a big mess to get it figured out. The support for it was in a time zone 11.5 hours different from ours. The eventually sent someone to be on site for a couple of weeks until stuff got worked out. We had a lot of trouble with files not getting checked in and older versions of files writing over the latest files. it took a while to track down how that was happening. The company was not yet using WT parts. Agile was still being used for PLM. When I left the company, that design group was implementing SolidWorks EPDM.
It's been about two years, so my memory is not as good about this as it was. Another company I worked for had design groups around the world. They had been using Agile for PLM. SolidWorks files were stored on the network and zipped and attached in Agile. They were purchased by another company who brought in Windchill. Agile was phased out. They were not the first group to use SolidWorks and Windchill. They had a dedicated Windchill support person one time zone away who came on site for about a week to train users. There were also recorded training and PowerPoint materials that you could refer back to. Part numbers were sequential and assigned by Windchill. The SolidWorks files were then linked to the WT part. So, to release a part number, you would put the WT part, the SolidWorks drawing and SLDPRT/SLDASM on the affected items of the CN. The PDF of the drawing was an attachment of the WT part. For just a few variations of things, the affected items list would get really long. We had to do a lot of bringing files that were on the network into Windchill. This is the kind of task you want a very detail oriented person to do. I would make a spreadsheet from the top level SolidWorks BOM and then add columns to make sure I completed each task for each part. Bring in the SolidWorks parts, attach them (more a relation than the attachment like the PDF is) to the WT part, make sure they were being checked into the correct folder. Make sure any purchased parts were replaced with the model from Windchill if they already existed. Then they could be checked in. Windchill and SolidWorks can do some talking about write permissions but there were a lot of issues around that. Basically, we would add things to a workspace and they would be read only until you checked them out the first time. Once you had checked them out the first time, they would no longer be read only, so you could make changes to things you hadn't checked out. To help prevent that, we had set this setting:
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But, the annoying thing about that setting in SolidWorks, if you open an assembly the parts are opened read only - EVEN IF YOU HAVE THEM CHECKED OUT, so I had a macro that would select File, get write access.
To get the autolock, you have to update the Windchill wgmclient.ini. I think these are the settings I had to change. They are screenshots from a saved email.
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You have to make sure that your users know to check for out of date parts regularly. Here are some images of what the interface looked like for finding the out of date parts. The small clock image indicates a file needs to be updated.
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Here were some of the columns that I had set to show so I could tell if things were out of date.
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It is possible to make changes to an out of date part. They can't be checked in. Remind your users that it is faster the second time and to make sure to have the last file before making changes.
