I use PDM Workgroup extensively for consulting. In terms of using it to control life cycle as well as control and segregate a combination of internal and customer proprietary data, I'm about pushing it to its limits. I have a fairly detailed description of my set up that I'll describe when I have a more time.
Some general thoughts. I recommend you use primary.secondary revision scheme where the primary revision is what shows up on the print - whether it's a Development or Production Release. The secondary revision allows for work in process between revisions to be checked into the vault, as you will want to do.
In the Vault Manager, you'll want to explicitly define your primary revisions as
-
X1
X2
X3
Xn (go as high as you think is practical; you CAN add more later, if necessary)
A
B
C
...
The "Dash revision" (you may use something else) is for when the file is brand new and not subject to any control but the engineer's whim.
You can define the secondary revision as a range from 00 to 99.
You will likely want six lifecycles. Lifecycles will be tied to revision to some extent:
1. Preliminary (the dash revision as well as -.01, -.02, etc.)
2. Development (your X revisions; primary only)
3. In Design - Development (interim changes when going between releases of X1 and X2, for instance; X1.01, X1.02, ...)
4. Production Release (Letter revs; primary only)
5. In Design - Production Release (interim changes when going between A and B, for instance; A.01, A.02)
6. Obsolete
To make all this work - to ensure Sales only has access to
Production Release documents, to ensure an Engineer can't move a document from
In Design - Development to
Production Release without document control, etc. - requires that you understand how PDM Workgroup controls access to documents.
In general, rights are assigned to users and/or groups.
Access can be controlled on the basis of:
- The Project that the file resides in. This controls access to the entire history of a file - all its revisions at any lifecyle state
- The Lifecycle Status - Lifecycle is tied to specific revisions of a file. So although Sales may have access to Project
Wonder Widget, if they have Read Only access to
Production Release files and NO access to files at other lifecycle states, they won't even see the
Preliminary,
Development,
In Design, or
Obsolete files.
The interactions between these controls are subtle & the implementation in PDM Workgroup is awful, so I'll write a follow up post.
One last thought, which probably doesn't apply in your case: I've created multiple PDM users for the same physical user so that access can be restricted depending on which client/project he or she is working on.
Rob
Imagitec: Imagination - Expertise - Execution
