administrating Pro-e without upsetting the users

Jsteele,

I have twice been involved in companies with partial or full transitions from Autocad. I found the following effective:

1 - Explain what and why changes are being done
2 - Have you standards, configurations, formats, symbols, etc. setup and tested before hand. There will be some teething pains, but nothing is worse than having stuff not work.
3 - Document, document, document - procedures, standards, techniques
4 - Assuming you have the right support, make a clean definite break from one system to the next or have clean, definite goals for the transition. This will minimize user confusion as to what happens when, how to make the change, etc.
5 - Build "go to" people for specialized techniques that your organization is faced with - i.e. Surface, Sheetmetal, Assembly techniques. The system is to big for one person to be the end-all, be-all expert.

Good luck.

Regards,
Jeff Zemsky
Plug Power

Define and Document your standards!!!!!

If you are straight ISO or ANSI, you are in good shape.
If you are working with a home-grown set of standards, look out!!!! Getting Pro/E to look like your AutoCAD is NOT fun and can be a real show stopper.

Next step. Get very familiar with the config.pro and *.dtl files. These are the equivalent of the AutoCAD setvar stuff.
Read and understand every environment setting.

Create start parts with your embedded standards.

Recreate some autoCAD details & assemblies in pro and get buy off of the new pro product!!!!!!!
Have people work off of the same start parts.