• Inconsistencies and Errors: Manual data collection can lead to outdated or incorrect information permeating through various documents.​
• Inefficiencies: Repetitive tasks and lack of automation slow down the documentation process, delaying product releases.​
• Scalability Issues: As products become more complex, managing documentation manually becomes increasingly untenable.

• Single Source of Truth: Centralize content to ensure consistency across all documentation.​
• Automated Updates: Link documentation directly to product data, allowing automatic updates when changes occur.​
• Multi-Channel Delivery: Publish content across various formats and platforms without redundant efforts

• Arbortext Editor: A powerful, XML-based authoring tool designed for creating structured content. It supports real-time validation, ensuring content conforms to required standards as it’s written. This not only improves accuracy but also reduces the need for post-creation corrections.
• Arbortext Styler: A stylesheet design application that lets users visually create and manage styles for multiple output formats. Publishing to PDF, HTML, or EPUB? Styler allows organizations to control formatting rules without needing to write code, greatly simplifying the publishing process.
• Arbortext Publishing Engine: The automation hub of the suite, this engine assembles, formats, and publishes content from Arbortext Editor using predefined styles and templates. It eliminates manual tasks and ensures consistent, repeatable publishing workflows across the enterprise.

• Field Service Technicians: These users rely on interactive 3D instructions and animations to perform repairs, maintenance, and diagnostics efficiently—often in high-pressure environments where accuracy matters most.
• Technical Illustrators & Documentation Teams: this tool helps technical communicators transform CAD data into professional illustrations, exploded views, and animated sequences for use in service manuals, parts catalogs, and user guides.
• Manufacturing Teams: On the shop floor, Creo Illustrate is used to deliver clear, visual work instructions that reduce assembly time, training effort, and human error.
• Training & Onboarding Teams: Organizations use Creo Illustrate to develop immersive training content that accelerates learning curves and boosts retention by showing—rather than just telling—how a product works.
• Product Support & Customer Service: Teams leverage visual content created in Creo Illustrate to enhance self-service portals and reduce support call volume by providing customers with intuitive instructions and part identification.

Having more technical illustrations than information is beneficial in many ways—and the solution to do so is easier than you think.

Here’s why you should be using more technical illustrations and the best way to create them.

Technical Illustrations are Easy to Understand

We all know the saying “ a picture paints a thousand words”—and in this case, it’s more than true.

It’s much easier to interpret a picture than to understand and read through lots of text. Using illustrations in tech pubs, user manuals, and service manuals reduce user errors.

Illustrations Take Away the Need for Text

Have you ever bought anything from Ikea? Sure you have! They sell their flat pack furniture all over the globe using the same manuals. That is the power of illustrations. You can drastically reduce the amount of text that is needed by producing illustrations.

Using Technical Illustrations Reduces the Need for Translation

With less text that is needed or used, you can reduce your translation costs.

So Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Illustrations?

The traditional process to create illustrations is time-consuming and can be froth with problems.

Let me illustrate it for you.

Odds are if you are using the traditional illustration process, your technical illustrators most likely work with engineers to get snapshots of CAD information to use in illustrations.

These snapshots are usually static because they are captured at only a moment in time, usually near the end of the product development process.

Because the illustrations are static, they are not always easy to interpret. This means the text is still required to properly convey the information.

If your snapshots were taken at the end of the product development process because there was ‘ less likelihood of the product changing’ – you could be delaying your shipment process.

Often a product cannot ship until the technical information that is associated with it is ready to ship with the product.

Now consider all the back and forth communication between both the engineering department and the illustration group.

Traditional illustrations are difficult to keep up to date. Commonly the illustrator needs to go back to the engineer for updates every time there is a change to the product.

If at any time there is a miscommunication, your illustrations could easily become inaccurate; exposing your organization to the risk of unsatisfied customers, frustrated field technicians, and the possibility of lawsuits.

It’s easy to see why the traditional methods to create illustrations are downright time consuming and prone to error.

So How Can You Make Technical Illustrations Easily?

The answer is Creo Illustrate.

Creo Illustrate leverages CAD data to create illustrations that, depending on your PDM/PLM setup, maintain an associative link to the original CAD data.

This means any changes you make with your CAD data can automatically update all your illustrations and possibly your publications.

With Creo Illustrate you have the ability to start creating illustrations early on in the product development process, with a guarantee that your illustrations are always kept up-to-date. Start developing product documentation during the product development process instead of after the product development process.

See Creo Illustrate in action! Watch this short video.

One of the great aspects of ThingWorx is the ability to connect disparate data silos to a central IoT hub. Many of these silos are made accessible through Web APIs. RESTful Web APIs enable developers to pull data from an inexhaustible number of sources around the web; often using nothing but a HTTP URI. Salesforce has an extensive REST API that can be accessed through ThingWorx. This blog will introduce you to creating a “Connected App” on Salesforce, authentication using username and password in ThingWorx, adding records to Salesforce, and finally modifying records. For a detailed description of Salesforce’s REST API, visit https://developer.salesforce.com/page/REST_API

Step 1 (Optional): Obtain a Developer Environment with Salesforce.com

If you do not already have a Salesforce account, navigate to https://developer.salesforce.com/platform/force.com and sign up for a free developer environment. It only takes a few minutes and you get a fully functioning Salesforce instance that you can freely develop in.

Step 2: Obtain a Security Token

You’ll need a security token to authenticate with a username and password. If you don’t already have one, or can’t dig it up from previous emails, you’ll need to reset the token.

Resetting the Token

1.    In the upper right-hand corner of your Salesforce page, click on your name and select “My Settings”

2.    On the left-hand menu, select “Personal”

3.    Under “Personal,” select “Reset My Security Token”

4.    Follow the directions on the page and you will receive a new security token via email

Step 3: Create a Connected App

To use the REST API, we’ll need to create a connected app that gives us a “Consumer Key” and a “Consumer Secret”.

Creating the Connected App

1.    Click on “Settings” in the upper right of your Salesforce screen

2.    On the left side, navigate to “Build” > “Create” > “Apps”

3.    Under the “Connected Apps” section, select “New”

4.    Fill out the fields as shown below. A callback URL is required but we won’t really be referencing it anywhere in ThingWorx. There is a great article on using Postman to test out REST calls with Salesforce at https://blog.mkorman.uk/using-postman-to-explore-salesforce-restful-web-services/ . The callback URL is used in the examples when authenticating in Postman.

5.    Click “Save.” You will get an alert that your connected app will take 2-10 minutes to take effect.

6.    After you click “Save,” you’ll see the “Consumer Key” and “Consumer Secret.” Copy those somewhere to use in ThingWorx.

Step 4: Authenticate Salesforce Session in ThingWorx

In this step, we’ll create a service in ThingWorx that returns a JSON for us to use in our other Salesforce requests.

1.    Create a service inside your Thing called AuthenticateSalesForce. I have a “TestThing” that I’ve created where I can try out new services without disrupting any of my live projects.

2.    Choose the “STRING” type for the result output, no inputs are needed unless you want to have the end user input their username and password. After we test functionality, we’ll change the output type to “JSON”

3.    Enter the following code, which is just the POST JSON function in the ContentLoaderFunction resource.

var params = {

                 proxyScheme: undefined /* STRING */,
                 headers: undefined /* JSON */,
                 ignoreSSLErrors: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                 useNTLM: undefined /* BOOLEAN *
                 workstation: undefined /* STRING */,
                 useProxy: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                 withCookies: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                 proxyHost: undefined /* STRING */,

url: "https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token?grant_type=password&client_id=&client_secret=&username= &password=" /* STRING */,

                 content: undefined /* JSON */,
                 timeout: undefined /* NUMBER */,
                 proxyPort: undefined /* INTEGER */,
                 password: undefined /* STRING */,
                 domain: undefined /* STRING */,
                 username: undefined /* STRING */

};

// result: JSON
var j = Resources["ContentLoaderFunctions"].PostJSON(params);

var result = j.access_token;

4.    Enter the consumer key, consumer secret, username (use %40 for the ‘@’ symbol), and password plus security token (enter your password and security token with no spaces between the two)

5.    Select “Done” on your service, save your Thing, and test the service. You should receive a session token like the one seen below:

6.    If nothing shows up, either the Salesforce server hasn’t activated the app, or there may be an issue with the URL. If you copy and paste the URL into PostMan, you should get an error message that clarifies the issue.

7.    When you’re getting an access token as the result, edit your service, change the result type to “JSON,” delete the last line (the “var result = j.access_token” line”), and modify the end of the service to now read:

// result: JSON

var result = Resources[“ContentLoaderFunctions”].PostJSON(params);

Step 5: Create a record in Salesforce

In this step, we’ll create a new account within salesforce using our new authentication service and a REST call utilizing the ContentLoaderFunctions.

1.    Create another new service in your Thing and call it AddSalesForceAccount. 2.    Create an input and call it AccountName. The type is “STRING” 3.    Type in the following code:

var authJSON = me.AuthenticateSalesForce();

var token = authJSON.access_token;
var instance_url = authJSON.instance_url;

var url = instance_url + "/services/data/v20.0/sobjects/Account/";

var authString = "Bearer " + token;
var headers = {
   "authorization" : authString,
   "content-type" : "application/json"
};

var content = {
 "Name" : AccountName
};

var params = {
                 proxyScheme: undefined /* STRING */,
                 headers: headers /* JSON */,
                 ignoreSSLErrors: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                 useNTLM: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                 workstation: undefined /* STRING */,
                 useProxy: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                 withCookies: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                 proxyHost: undefined /* STRING */,
   url: url /* STRING */,
                 content: content /* JSON */,
                 timeout: undefined /* NUMBER */,
                 proxyPort: undefined /* INTEGER */,
                 password: undefined /* STRING */,
                 domain: undefined /* STRING */,
                 username: undefined /* STRING */
};

// result: JSON
var result = Resources["ContentLoaderFunctions"].PostJSON(params);

4. Test the service. Enter a unique account name and verify that it shows up in Salesforce.

Step 6: Retrieve a Record ID

To modify a record, the record ID must be used to reference the object of interest. We can make a request to Salesforce to return relevant records using an SOQL query. This example will cover retrieving the record ID of the account we just created in the last step.

1.    Create a new service in your Thing

2.    Create an input and call it AccountName. The type is “STRING”

3.    Type in the following code:

var authJSON = me.AuthenticateSalesForce();


var token = authJSON.access_token;
var instance_url = authJSON.instance_url;

var url = instance_url + "/services/data/v20.0/query/?q=SELECT+name+FROM+Account+WHERE+name+=+'" + AccountName + "'";

var authString = "Bearer " + token;
var headers = {
   "authorization" : authString,
   "content-type" : "application/json"
};




var params = {
                  proxyScheme: undefined /* STRING */,
                  headers: headers /* JSON */,
                  ignoreSSLErrors: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  useNTLM: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  workstation: undefined /* STRING */,
                  useProxy: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  withCookies: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  proxyHost: undefined /* STRING */,
                  url: url /* STRING */,
                  timeout: undefined /* NUMBER */,
                  proxyPort: undefined /* INTEGER */,
                  password: undefined /* STRING */,
                  domain: undefined /* STRING */,
                  username: undefined /* STRING */

};




// result: JSON
var j = Resources["ContentLoaderFunctions"].GetJSON(params);

var result = j.records[0].attributes.url;

4. Give the service a name and test it. The output of this service is a url that can be appended to the instance_url that is returned in the response from the Authentication service.

Step 7: Modify a Record

Using the output from our last service, we can now easily modify the fields of the record ID that we just retrieved. Keep in mind, if you create a custom field and you want to modify its value, add a “__c” to the end of the field name (denotes custom field).

1. Create a new service in your Thing
2. Let’s give it a few “STRING” inputs: field, stringValue, and AccountName
3. Input the following code:

var authJSON = me.AuthenticateSalesForce();

var token = authJSON.access_token;
var instance_url = authJSON.instance_url;

var stringJSON = '{"' + field + '":' + stringValue + "}";


var params = {
                  AccountName: AccountName /* STRING */
};

// result: STRING
var object_url = me.RetrieveSalesForceAccountRecordID(params);

var url = instance_url + object_url + "?_HttpMethod=PATCH";
var authString = "Bearer " + token;
var headers = {
   "authorization" : authString,
   "content-type" : "application/json"
};

var content = JSON.parse(stringJSON);

var params = {
                  proxyScheme: undefined /* STRING */,
                  headers: headers /* JSON */,
                  ignoreSSLErrors: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  useNTLM: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  workstation: undefined /* STRING */
                  useProxy: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  withCookies: undefined /* BOOLEAN */,
                  proxyHost: undefined /* STRING */,
                  url: url /* STRING */,
                  content: content /* JSON */,
                  timeout: undefined /* NUMBER */,
                  proxyPort: undefined /* INTEGER */,
                  password: undefined /* STRING */,
                  domain: undefined /* STRING */,
                  username: undefined /* STRING */
};
// result: JSON
var result = Resources["ContentLoaderFunctions"].PostJSON(params);

A Note About Security

Salesforce has a few ways to authenticate your session.  The method described in this blog is the least secure way because ThingWorx has visibility to the username and password of the Salesforce account.  There are two other ways to authenticate and both use callback URLs.  Basically, a user sends a call to the login endpoint and enters user and password information directly into the Salesforce environment.  Salesforce then redirects to a callback URL that is appended with an authorization token.  If you’d like to implement one of the more secure methods, I would suggest using a REST endpoint to a ThingWorx service as your callback URL. More specifically, create a service that has a string input called “code.” Now, change your callback URL in your Salesforce connected app to something like https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=&redirect_uri=>.  Now, when you navigate to the login link, it will send your authorization code to your ThingWorx service (this is because it appends “&code=” to the URL).  You’ll need to then send that code via the Content Loader Functions to receive your authorization token.  One thing to note is that the ThingWorx instance must be on HTTPS.  Salesforce does not allow HTTP callback URLs.  More information about Authentication can be found at https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/intro_understanding_authentication.htm

If you have any questions about this blog or ThingWorx in general, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact EAC Product Development Solutions.

In the last few weeks I’ve discussed the benefits and costs of customization. This week I will review deciding whether to customize or not. If you missed these posts, you can read them here:

• Part 1: The Benefits of Customizing PTC Arbortext
• Part 2: The Cost of Customizing PTC Arbortext

So how can you weigh the benefits against the costs of customizing? If we examine the criteria outlined above, a general pattern emerges, which provides the key insight in making this decision:

Benefits mainly go to end users, and costs mainly go to developers and administrators.

Installations with large user bases, where the value of customizations can be maximized, are good candidates for customization. Also, organizations that have dedicated staff for maintaining the Arbortext system will have an easier time managing customized installations than organizations where maintenance and development is a part-time task for staff with other responsibilities.

In organizations that have a small number of users, it will be difficult to realize enough value in customizations to make it worth the expense of implementing them. In these instances, it makes sense to stick with a mostly out-of-the-box installation using a standard doctype like DITA or DocBook, possibly with some stylesheet adjustments to get the desired output appearance.

Consider standard features first.

With all software, you can get the most value from your investment if you maximize the use of its standard features. If you are new to the software or perhaps not leveraging everything the software offers, you should explore the best practices and benefits first to determine if customization is truly needed. With Arbortext, PTC recommends an implementation approach called “Value-ready Deployment” which leverages the value of Arbortext using standard features and recommended best practices to maximize the value to each customer before any customizations are made.

Also consider prepackaged add-ons.

EAC offers several prepackaged add-ons which add capabilities to the Arbortext platform at a lower cost than a customization. One of our add-ons is EAC QuickPubs.

QuickPubs allows users to create aesthetically pleasing Operator Guides, Service Manuals, and Parts Catalogs quickly while providing an easy way to style documents that fit your brand. If you decide to investigate customizing Arbortext for your environment, EAC can help you explore your options with a variety of prepackaged add-ons, training, and implementation services.

Transform the way you design and publish product information through QuickPubs, an EAC product for PTC Arbortext. For more information about QuickPubs, you can download the brochure here. Publish faster, cheaper, and better today!