PDM Administration Training

so welcome everybody to PDM Administration training this is an introductory session just to learn about the basics of PDM your hosts so my name is Eric vanessen I overseer product line here at javelin I've been with javelin 12 years and about the last 11 years I've had a strong focus on helped out with PDM So currently oversee a number of products but PDM is is one of them that I'm intimately involved with I am certified to be a as a specialist for PDM and certified in SolidWorks as well you know just a quick warning um you know before we proceed I do want to make sure that everybody's aware that if you are the main PDM administrator at your company highly highly recommended to attend a proper PDM Administration course um just we just see this time and time again where customers are trying to self-implement and sell and do a little bit maybe too much without the proper knowledge and we totally encourage Independence but um but uh you know I guess you know just to put it out there it can be more costly to repair mistakes than it can be just to get it right and get the proper knowledge to begin with so please consider proper admin training and get certified yourself all right so the the key uh topics that I thought was would be appropriate for an introductory PDM admin course is going through the process of creating a brand new Vault I'm talking about creating folder structure and then we'll talk about groups and user permissions and settings um and a core part of PDM is the data that you're tracking for your file so we'll talk about data cards and variables and then lastly we'll end off on some basics of of a workflow what is it and and really the most important aspect is how does it control revision scheme and if time permits we'll do a q a so just a huge amount of content here today so hopefully we get through it all so to start off um we'll uh we'll talk about creating a brand new vault so I'm going to access the PDM Administration application so you can do this through your tools drop-down menu if you're within a vault or in your search your start menu you can search for administration and you should have access to it and you do need to have a login for it so there is a default admin login you should you'll see the name of your server that's hosting the PDM vaults and you can create a new vault okay so I'm going to go next there's two types of volts we have professional and standard volts so it depends on what you have installed I have a PDM professional installed but most of what I'm doing today um is uh you know is really available on standard as well so we'll do PDM training test vault um as that so we'll just do something for today go next this is where it stores the back end data so the files can be stored on a separate server but usually on in an archive on the exact same server that's hosting the database and then we have an opportunity or then you attach it to the database and what's the database name for that volt so a lot of this is Wizard base and next next you know this is how it communicates um for the license server and uh and we're going to hit next there which is fine at this point we have an opportunity to change the date format so you want to follow a date format that follows you know as close as possible to what uh what you follow internally um copy the same in default admin password and then you have a choice of a starting bolt I could create an empty one there's a default or there's a quick start personally I'm a big fan of the of the default one because there's a lot of great content that I like leveraging and I feel like it's easier to delete content than it is to clean it up an example of that is going through this list so you can check off you know when in doubt you could check off everything if you like but the main ones I wanted to point out is if you are a PDM professional users and if you're using 2017 there's really some some really nice new task automation that this is your opportunity to add it so you can add tasks that will automatically convert your SolidWorks files to PDFs dwgs to PDF office documents to PDFs so it's a lot of automation that you can add some of that I'm going to cover in the more advanced webinar the refresher that's directly after this let's go to finish and at that point the PDM Administration is going to go and create a new Vault so pretty straightforwards um you know I just wanted to start off with that because there's I just want to make sure you guys are aware that we're not doing any magic here today I'm literally starting with a brand new Vault for the training today and give you a sense of you know how easy it is to get get started with Administration so let's go and create folder structure for this Vault now so I'm going to go back into the administration panel so we can see uh this is the PDM training test fault is the one I created and the first thing I need to do is when I'm on a user computer I need to add a volt view for it so if you right click on it you have the ability to create local View and you can use the the default or the admin password that you guys have have set up during the installation and then we have an opportunity to select where you want the local Vault view my recommendation is to keep all your Vault views if you have multiple volts on the C drive you know most importantly what you do want to do is make sure that they are consistent um or for anybody that has a vault view so you want to make sure that everybody who has this particular Vault view has it in the exact same location um it's not you know not absolutely necessary but I do find that it can be helpful when you're sending if you're sending hyperlinks to files at those hyperlinks um work work better obviously if you are if they're pointing to the same spot so there's different opportunities to share files around and now you know the beauty about using SolidWorks PDM is that it's Windows Explorer based so this is I'm starting with the blank folder structure and really if I want to create a folder structure what I should do is just hit new folder and start building it up so I'm going to create a new maybe Administration folder we'll do a new folder for projects we'll do a new folder for maybe Library and yeah that's pretty good for now so the idea is that you can just go and create new new new folders using that admin login and you can go underneath there and create subfolders but it's no different than Windows Explorer you can actually drag and drop a folder structure from Windows Explorer as well so pretty straightforwards to get kind of a base structure started the next um the next webinar as well I'll talk about how we can automate some of that folder structure to keep it nice and organized but that's kind of the starting point is just getting getting those for those folders started so let's move on to groups and user permissions I'm going to go back to that Min panel and go in the same Vault that I'm that I just added so we did PDM training test fault and you'll notice that there's no groups and the only user is going to be that admin user so in order to start testing out groups and users what you do want to do is create a couple sample users the best way to do that is to right click select new and we can go select from users that we've added in the past in this case I'm going to add myself Eric I've used it on other volts and you can just hit next and then you have an opportunity to go and add more information about the user so this would be helpful when you are communicating with others and you're seeing who's got what checked out it can be really handy to supply their phone numbers or extensions or emails directly in there and that's just a way to to make sure that people are communicating you know appropriately as they're you know as they're navigating around and working with each other I can go through and add all these permissions here but the best way to do it is to add is to add this user to group so I could add them to groups now if there was groups available but I don't have that available so this is literally all I need to do for a user select okay so now we have two users that Min login and my login Eric let's go over to groups so groups again is the best way to control permissions and how users interact with the Vault so I'm going to right click select new group and we'll call this designers select next and then what we can do is go and add the group members so I'm going to add and I'm going to say Eric is going to be one of the designers now when it comes to permissions there's permissions are broken out into really all these different categories on the left so I don't have time to go through all of them today but I'm going to go through over over the most critical ones there's administrative privileges so administrative privileges are ones that you can have partial access to some of the administration that we're going over today you know just an example of something that you might want some users or power users at least have access to something like search forms you know search forms and search favorites you can have users set up and use those if they obviously if they know what they're doing but it it really can't do much harm it's never going to you're never gonna lose data you know you're really just allowing people to be more productive so stuff like that is quite common for us to allocate to uh to broader audience it's not the nice thing about Administration is that it's not all or nothing folder MIP permissions are really important in the structure of the Vault I've seen this happen a lot where users select the top level of the Vault and they say you know what let's give all permissions to or permissions to everything in the vault but the biggest thing that I've seen or biggest issue I've had with that is that the Vault ends up a mess and I find that users when they give too much permissions or companies when they give too much permissions and everybody's free to do you know what they want it just feels disorganized and it makes people dislike the working in the vault more because they just can't work efficiently right and find stuff because it's not not consistent so a better way to go about doing that is going into the individual areas at least at the highest level and what should users do at that level so in this case I'm going to actually I am going to give full permission at these sub levels so at the libraries and at the projects but at the administration I'm not going to give any permission and I'm not even going to give read access for the time being just to just to show you what that looks like you can always monitor the signed folder permissions so you can go through and see which ones are assigned and I can remove them from here as well and that's kind of a quick way to remove permissions and the nice thing is if you do have um files below this so say you had a specific project that you wanted to remove permissions from it's actually not an additive thing you can actually it's it drills down into the subfolder so it always looks at what the closest folder is to where you're browsing so if I had a project within here I could go in there in the sub project and remove permissions and make it invisible so that's a common thing for um uh you know for restricting access for higher sensitive data let's go and take a look what that looks like so to test it out what I'm going to do is log off myself and it's tough to see this because I'm doing another screen but in the bottom right you can hit in the task pane you can hit the blue dot for your Vault and I'm going to log off my volt and I'm going to log in using my new login so I'll just show you the login here in a minute so I have my new login and I'm going to log in with Eric okay when you log log off like that um what the in the Windows Explorer area it's going to automatically boot you back to the desktop the quickest way to browse back to where you were is just hit the back button you'll right away end up exactly where you were what I wanted to point out is something that's a very common thing when customers are getting used to PDM for the first time they see a combination of these green folders and these gray folders and it could be gray folders and gray files um this is an important thing to be aware of the green folders are folders that are live access to the Vault the grayed out folders is information which is just cached locally but is not actually have or I don't actually have there's no access to that to the Vault right now and no permissions this brings up a really important point that I wanted to talk about groups and users and that when you're dealing with groups and users if you double click you access all of the permissions but when you right click and go to settings there's other options available and this is really about the experience of somebody involved it is much less to do with permissions and there's more to do with preferences so the preferences are in the settings the permissions are in if you double click okay that's a real real key thing to be aware of when you're getting used to users and groups again I don't have time to go through all of these I highly recommend that you know if you're if you if you're not taking PDM admin training to make sure to be intimately familiar with the help file but the one that I will point out because it does come up a lot is this Explorer View so if you click on the explore view you can see that I have the option do I want to see all my files show only the files that are part of the file Vault or show only local files in all honesty I'm not sure why this last option exists um it's kind of ridiculous because who would ever want to see only local cash stuff and not stuff that's part of the Vault so really these two these top two are the two options and I'm a big fan you know for users who know exactly what they're doing it's not a bad idea to see local files because there are rare cases where you might have a local file that you need to go and manually add to the Vault and it's not added yet and it might be confusing and whatnot but in all honesty for the most part users are better off if they show only files that are part of the file Vault so I'm going to select that as option select ok in order to see that reflected I do actually need to log off and log back in so I'm just going to do that one more time I'm going to log off myself I'm going to log back into the same Vault again actually I can just hit back it'll force me to log in like so and then you see that Administration folder that was grayed out before is now gone so again just to reiterate that came that came about because um because of that setting so it's a preference it's not a permission and it's important to be aware of both as as you go through let's keep moving along here again on any of these Topics by the way feel free to type in uh questions if you wanted to see anything more if time permits at the end I'm happy to dive back into them to touch some more I just thought I'd touch on some high level areas just to get more familiar as as we go through so next up is data cards and variables in order to manipulate and work with data cards and variables it's best to add some file types that we want to experiment with and I'm going to show you this um and I'm going to vote to get an error but I wanted to show you this anyway because it's an it's an error that a lot of customers have when they first get started I'm going to drag and drop a file in and you're going to notice that even though I gave myself full permission on that folder I don't have permission to add a file to this fault and when you're getting used to PDM for the first time this can be a very frustrating thing so this is a very key thing that I wanted to to bring up let me browse back to the administration and so forth and I wanted to bring up before I move on to the Ada cards one final thing on groups and users and that's a really critical thing related to permissions although folder permissions are really important on how somebody can interact with different areas of the Vault and equally as important permission is the state permissions every single file that gets added to the PDM environment is required to be in a workflow and the file needs to hit meet the qualifications of the workflow and the user who's adding the file needs to have the right permissions for that workflow as well in this case the um what I'm going to do just to kind of shortcut a little bit because I am going to talk a little bit more about workflow at the end of this this webinar and more again in the next webinar afterwards what I'm going to do is I'm going to take State permissions for that group box select every single state in that default workflow and in this case I'm going to give myself full permissions to every single state I am going to maybe back off one notch here and say you know what when it's approved I actually don't want every permission I'm going to say I can just read file contents so without getting into all the granular capabilities of what you can do and can't do at different points of time and what you know the recommendations may be are more or less you know in my opinion you know a good starting point is read file contents that are are approved and other statuses you know if you want flexibility just give full access on the states it's kind of a good starting point that's going to be you know avoid some of the frustration um now this isn't a mandatory one you want to think about who can do what during this um and really this is where you start breaking up into different roles but the transitions is where you um where you pass files from one status to another I'm going to leave them um actually I'm going to give no permissions to Transitions yet because I'm going to talk about that as part of the workflow and I don't require them to add files so now that I've done that I'm going to go back to the vault and add some sample files I'll just drag and drop some sample files in and you'll see that now those files are checked out by myself okay so the topic I wanted to focus on now is the next topic is the data card so when you click on a file or if you click on a folder or really if you click on anything in the vaults you get a data card so it's a really key aspect of the vault is this data card and the data card is what controls the information it comes and it could come from a number of sources it could come from Custom properties of SolidWorks files information could be driven down from a project so all this project information might drive down into the files themselves it could be used in bill of materials or it could be manually entered and it could also be manipulated as part of workflow you know for instance if somebody approves a file their name in the in today's date should end up on that file as the person that approves it on that date again that's something I'm doing in the more advanced one but those are examples of of more Advanced Data manipulation so data cards you know are quite important uh to your to your uh Vault setup there's a pretty decent a good decent one here that you should be aware of but it's always worthwhile to think about what's important to me so I'm clicking on a file and I see the data card when you're working on a data card it's nice to see the result as you're working so what I've done in the past is just take that file or that folder and just drag that over to the right oh and then when you go into the administration tool and drag that to the left you have an opportunity to go and browse into the cards area so there's five different types of cards here file cards and folder cards are the ones I just showed you item cards are uh there's an aspect of the PDM Vault called items that in all honesty a very very small percentage of customers use because most of what you can do in there you can do with virtual files anyhow so I most customers I recommend that they don't really go towards items because I just don't see it in an area that SolidWorks is investing in but it's available and does have does solve some some issues in some goals that customers have search cards are used first for us doing the Performing searches and then template cards are used for launching new new templates to help keep to company standards okay um so let's go and edit the file cards so I'm going to expand expand the file cards and you can see that in Brackets next to these file cards you can see which files they're for when I'm clicking on that part you can it's an sld PRT that's the card so I have to look for that extension sld PRT and it's called SolidWorks part card making it really easy to find let's double click that and now we can start manipulating that card so just a couple uh simple things so first off if there's things that you're looking at and you're like you know what I really don't see myself using that I'd probably just go ahead and delete it so um now mind you it's not a bad idea to learn about what these things do before you go deleting them um but uh but a good idea to delete them so let's let's take one like design checking as an example I'm going to go and delete those let's go and delete those two fields I can save that cart okay and I just realized that I don't have permission to save that card and that's actually because I'm working with my Eric login instead of admin login so I'm actually going to shift over to that Min login for this as I as I do some of this data card manipulation give me one second so I'm logging off that min and going back or logging off Eric and going back to admin okay so you can actually log off and log in without even leaving this uh this tool which is nice so let's hit save and now I have permission to save if I want to see the update I can click on that file and I can see that that update so that I don't have that that information there anymore okay let's go make another change so say for instance created by author maybe I did want to add an approved buy here so I did want to track approved by so let's go and add that as a field so I can just drag and manipulate some of these uh this card You Can Box select Fields if you want so let's go and box select all this information down here so I have a little bit more room and what I'm going to do is actually just take all those fields and do like a control c and a control V just so I have similar information okay like so okay there we go and now these fields you can see that they're linked to they're both linked to author and these fields are and the fields on the right are both linked to date that's obviously not what I want I want to break these out and Link them to different variables so to do that you click on the field and you select from the drop down list of the of the appropriate variables and in this case approved by is available so I can just select it if it's not available what I'd have to do is hit variables and I'd have to go and add a new variable so I go new variable and add it okay let's so do the date I'm going to manipulate that one and and change it to a different date so actually what I want to do is change it to approved on is it is a date specific to the approval which is great and then I hit save again go over here click on the file and I can see that my card's being updated to track the information that I want it's starting to look a little sloppy so you know it is good to be aware of all these nice tools up here that help me clean up the clean up the card again going a little bit beyond what we're you know what the scope of what we can cover today but lots of great Tools in order to get a really nice looking date data card and track what you need to the other thing that I wanted to touch on before I move on is the importance of linking information to custom properties so say for instance I had the author and approved by and the dates like the origination date and the proof by date if I wanted those to end up on the title block of a drawing which you know 9 out of 10 customers really do you need to make sure that they're linked appropriately to the custom properties that you use on your on your SolidWorks drawing so hopefully you know the custom properties that you're using on your drawing today in this case it's the part but uh you know on the drawing is um you know obviously would work the same way um and what you need to do is go to the variable for for each one of these so you can hit variables and bring up this variable editor and this right area is how you link it to those custom properties so in this case what this is telling me is that approved on the variable in PDM is linked to a custom property called approved on but it's only linked for PDFs in all honesty I'm not actually sure why that that's a default there probably is some stuff related to PDFs where that's a good default and works out great but in practice the custom properties of PDFs are not nearly as important as a ton of other files mainly SolidWorks and office documentation so let's just I can add new attributes and Link it if I'm wanted to keep that one but in this case I'm just going to manipulate it so I do want it linked to a custom property that's correct approved on is not the date that I do or not the custom property I use for my approval date in fact in SolidWorks what I use is a custom property called approved date okay with no space and then you need to add in the extensions which the extensions would you like that to add for sld sdrw and sld PRT that sort of idea um and if you do a lot of these really what you need to do is is have a go-to of this drop down list so this stores kind of all the the key combinations as part of the default and you should have one that you know that you use commonly and there's no there's no harm really in having too many extensions here except for that it can be a little bit overwhelming to look at um so it's nice to see that you want to make sure of course that you get the right one so all my SolidWorks files and if I am going to use the same thing for office documents you want to make sure that your key Office document extensions are in there as well select okay and you're done so I can't I'm not going to go to the extent of showing that all in action but that's a really critical part if I want this field which is Let me refresh that um oh sorry one last thing I forgot to change the text in front so it still says created by and date so I should add I should change that so it's a little bit more meaningful and I should say approved by and you can keep a date because it's kind of intuitive that it's next to approved by um up up to you what uh what you'd like to do there let's save that and now when I click on a file you can see approved by so again just to reiterate um this field right here if I were to fill fill that in um ideally it's filled in automatically as part of a workflow but when that gets filled in now that I linked that to the custom property approved date it will it will automatically update that file and update our SolidWorks title block at the same time that's something actually again I'm going to show in this the next next webinar if you wanted to stay on the line for it okay um so hopefully that was informative for you that for everybody that's new to PDM Administration so uh again that was kind of some basics of data cards and variables you know there's obviously a lot a lot more to it but what you need to be aware of is that this is the I call I consider it the heart of PDM because the the data that you're tracking and how you're tracking it is going to severely impact how productive you are as a team let's go on to our last topic of today's webinar uh which is basic workflows and revision schemes to demonstrate this I'm actually going to switch back again back to um the Eric login because I want to see how the workflows behave as a designer there we go okay so let's go back all right so the first thing you need to know about workflows is that just to reiterate from before every single file in the vault needs to end up in one workflow or another you know a nice a nice advantage of PDM professional is that you can have an unlimited number of workflows where PDM standard you're limited to one workflow so in PDM standard all files end up in the same workflow is really the is the only option in PDM professional you can divide up files based on their properties where they're stored who's saving them their extensions you know many many different fronts you can divide up files automatically files get added to your workflow um by checking them in so I'm going to hit check in on all those files you can see that PDM is picking up those references you can add a comment so you can say initial check in like so and then you can see that the status column is going to show me the state that those files get added to okay you can see that information in the data card as well because that was called out there so it's under editing and it's also seen under the version tab so the version tab shows a little bit more information you can see that the file is under editing and it's in the default workflow this is actually the only spot where you see the the actual workflow name that that files in okay so how does that look in the background in admin let's go and back over to the Min side where you can access workflows is right at the bottom of the administration there's an area workflows and if you double click on your workflow you'll see this flowchart so this is literally what's driving those files back and forth so you know really really nice to work with very very intuitive in my opinion but still take some some practice and knowledge to get familiar with and how it works I'm going to um again I can only go over the basics today because I wanted to keep it fairly concise and get you guys started the first thing I want to point out is that that little symbol in the bottom right of under editing the document with that star on it that symbolizes that this is the first status in the workflow if I click on it you can see a check mark for that so if you deselected that and selected a different one you can start with files in a different status if you like and that actually can be handy if you're migrating a lot of data in sometimes you want to temporarily have them migrated into a different status in which case you can just change that out what your default is so far um I was showing you before that you can control permissions at the group level and you can do it for all the states there but sometimes it's more intuitive to do it right while you're working on the workflow itself so the permission that I added for the designers group shows up here so I can see all the permissions that I added for designers and just to reiterate that or if you recall on the approved status I went to designers and the only permission I added was read file contents okay so that's what we have so far the areas just to get terminology straight these buckets or by boxes sorry are called statuses or States and the arrows in between we call transitions okay um in order to access a transition you do need to have permission to it so in this case there's under editing and there's waiting for the only two possible arrows out are submit for approval to go to waiting for approval or no approval required in which it goes straight to approved okay so both of these if I wanted to have access to I'd have to assign a permission this one is really something that's meant for power users who know that they want to bypass and just move files around um and in my opinion it shouldn't really be used it's like why why bother with that so uh in order to have access to this you click on the transition you can add the groups or users that you want to give permission to in this case again I want to set up designers like so and then you click on the group and you permit them okay select ok save the workflow and we're good so the way that that shows up to the user is a couple spots but to me the most intuitive is just in that right click menu when you right click on a file and go to change State you now have the option to submit it for approval if I wanted to give that other permission so I'll just temporarily give it just to give an idea so I'll add the permission for bypass like so hit save so now I just gave that permission to no approval required if I right click now you can see both no approval required or submit for approval so that flowchart again is driving how we interact with those files let's go and submit that file for approval you have an option here and then you can say please review something like that and change state and then you can see that status changing from under editing to waiting for approval okay if I right click on that file again and go to change State you'll see that I don't have permission to approve and that's because of my role so I've only created one group so far designers really the right way to do it is to create a different group of people that would be approving files and give them permission okay if you do have users that approve each other's work there's a way to do that without them proving their own work which is nice too but that's again a little bit beyond what I was planning on covering today let me go uh you know it's quick enough to do so I'm just going to show you um you know what I'd recommend doing there let's go and create a new group so I'll say I'll call this um well we'll call that approvers you can call it managers or what you have you okay and the the most you know really the key transition that you want to give them is um uh past approval so this one so it goes from waiting approval to approve so past approval is permitted and the group members just as a like you know usually it's different users typically but in this case I'm going to add permission to Eric as well so not only is my login Eric a designer but I also have permission to approve so now that I have permission to do that I can right click go to change State and I have past approval so it's a really key thing to be aware of that the administrative privileges don't necessarily have to come from a single group you can divide that up and use use some strategy depending on the size and and functionality that you'd like to accomplish with your team when I pass approval you know write a comment looks good select OK you'll see that that file goes from waiting for approval to approved the other really key thing that's happening in the background is the history so as we did that you can see we're building up a file and a history of like the comments along the way who did what and in this case it's all done by my One login and the last thing I wanted to point out is that at the end of the workflow um so far now that it's approved it's stamped with revision a so a really really critical part to working in PDM and the best practice hands down is to have workflow Drive the revision now there's ways around it you can try to do it without and just you know click and bump revision but in my opinion it's not the way you should be working workflow no matter how simple you make it should be the way that you drive and increment revision and that's the best way to drive a build up history as it controls permissions and it really keeps everybody you know working correctly as that as they work collaboratively together so if anybody ever has a different opinion on that I'm happy to discuss you know where you know what might be uh might be Alternatives but you know ideally you know in all honesty what I'm going to do is probably convince you that workflow is the is the best way to go okay I'm going to show you how that works and I want to show you an example of changing revision scheme to end off this webinar first of all how that works this workflow that came with this default vault as it went through the past approval transition there was an action that took place there's two actions actually the first action was setting the variable revision with the next revision counter why do we need to do that is so that it ends up on the title block when we're printing that file so that's mainly for drawings if you drive that down in there if you were to print a drawing after it's been approved it'll have the correct revision on the title block the next action is bumping the revision so it's an increment revision action and then there's a tab here for revision numbers and you can say that the the revision number that I'm incrementing is their Alpha revision component okay so that's how it bumps let's go see what it takes to change that to numeric and just get a sense and get a little bit more grasp of how revisions work out in the administration side there's revision components and revision numbers now I could go and create new components and new numbers but then I'd have to go and update my workflow to start using those new number names and new numbers most customers only have one one revision scheme so you know usually what I do is take the existing one or out of the box one the alpha revision component and just rename it name it because Alpha doesn't really make sense in fact I can just take out Alpha and I can call it revision number and in the back end you know the Administration has set up such that that doesn't break anything you know it's you it's all pointed correctly and and uh works well same thing for the the component you can take the alpha revision component you can call that revision component and instead of alpha that's that a b c there I can just back out and I can choose a different counter so I can go to number pick a two digit number in this case I use I like personally the idea of starting at zero and select ok so now we have a revision number and it uses the revision component and if I go into my workflow you'll see that the counter is using um oops that needs to be refreshed does use the right one I promise the counter is going to be using the revision component as well okay so how does that behave let's go into the files right click on one of the the SolidWorks files submit it for approval okay let's do okay so that's waiting for approval and when I right click and pass approval select ok it goes to approved again the difference is that instead of alpha we're getting zero zero so you can see local revision component in the history you can see Zero Zero and if you were to go to the data card you're going to see 0 0 as well the data card just to reiterate is the revision component the revision variable that drives down into the file so that it can print properly and shows a right revision when you go to print it'll just take a moment to review the questions as well

so welcome everybody to PDM Administration training this is an introductory session just to learn about the basics of PDM your hosts so my name is Eric vanessen I overseer product line here at javelin I&#39;ve been with javelin 12 years and about the last 11 years I&#39;ve had a strong focus on helped out with PDM So currently oversee a number of products but PDM is is one of them that I&#39;m intimately involved with I am certified to be a as a specialist for PDM and certified in SolidWorks as well you know just a quick warning um you know before we proceed I do want to make sure that everybody&#39;s aware that if you are the main PDM administrator at your company highly highly recommended to attend a proper PDM Administration course um just we just see this time and time again where customers are trying to self-implement and sell and do a little bit maybe too much without the proper knowledge and we totally encourage Independence but um but uh you know I guess you know just to put it out there it can be more costly to repair mistakes than it can be just to get it right and get the proper knowledge to begin with so please consider proper admin training and get certified yourself all right so the the key uh topics that I thought was would be appropriate for an introductory PDM admin course is going through the process of creating a brand new Vault I&#39;m talking about creating folder structure and then we&#39;ll talk about groups and user permissions and settings um and a core part of PDM is the data that you&#39;re tracking for your file so we&#39;ll talk about data cards and variables and then lastly we&#39;ll end off on some basics of of a workflow what is it and and really the most important aspect is how does it control revision scheme and if time permits we&#39;ll do a q a so just a huge amount of content here today so hopefully we get through it all so to start off um we&#39;ll uh we&#39;ll talk about creating a brand new vault so I&#39;m going to access the PDM Administration application so you can do this through your tools drop-down menu if you&#39;re within a vault or in your search your start menu you can search for administration and you should have access to it and you do need to have a login for it so there is a default admin login you should you&#39;ll see the name of your server that&#39;s hosting the PDM vaults and you can create a new vault okay so I&#39;m going to go next there&#39;s two types of volts we have professional and standard volts so it depends on what you have installed I have a PDM professional installed but most of what I&#39;m doing today um is uh you know is really available on standard as well so we&#39;ll do PDM training test vault um as that so we&#39;ll just do something for today go next this is where it stores the back end data so the files can be stored on a separate server but usually on in an archive on the exact same server that&#39;s hosting the database and then we have an opportunity or then you attach it to the database and what&#39;s the database name for that volt so a lot of this is Wizard base and next next you know this is how it communicates um for the license server and uh and we&#39;re going to hit next there which is fine at this point we have an opportunity to change the date format so you want to follow a date format that follows you know as close as possible to what uh what you follow internally um copy the same in default admin password and then you have a choice of a starting bolt I could create an empty one there&#39;s a default or there&#39;s a quick start personally I&#39;m a big fan of the of the default one because there&#39;s a lot of great content that I like leveraging and I feel like it&#39;s easier to delete content than it is to clean it up an example of that is going through this list so you can check off you know when in doubt you could check off everything if you like but the main ones I wanted to point out is if you are a PDM professional users and if you&#39;re using 2017 there&#39;s really some some really nice new task automation that this is your opportunity to add it so you can add tasks that will automatically convert your SolidWorks files to PDFs dwgs to PDF office documents to PDFs so it&#39;s a lot of automation that you can add some of that I&#39;m going to cover in the more advanced webinar the refresher that&#39;s directly after this let&#39;s go to finish and at that point the PDM Administration is going to go and create a new Vault so pretty straightforwards um you know I just wanted to start off with that because there&#39;s I just want to make sure you guys are aware that we&#39;re not doing any magic here today I&#39;m literally starting with a brand new Vault for the training today and give you a sense of you know how easy it is to get get started with Administration so let&#39;s go and create folder structure for this Vault now so I&#39;m going to go back into the administration panel so we can see uh this is the PDM training test fault is the one I created and the first thing I need to do is when I&#39;m on a user computer I need to add a volt view for it so if you right click on it you have the ability to create local View and you can use the the default or the admin password that you guys have have set up during the installation and then we have an opportunity to select where you want the local Vault view my recommendation is to keep all your Vault views if you have multiple volts on the C drive you know most importantly what you do want to do is make sure that they are consistent um or for anybody that has a vault view so you want to make sure that everybody who has this particular Vault view has it in the exact same location um it&#39;s not you know not absolutely necessary but I do find that it can be helpful when you&#39;re sending if you&#39;re sending hyperlinks to files at those hyperlinks um work work better obviously if you are if they&#39;re pointing to the same spot so there&#39;s different opportunities to share files around and now you know the beauty about using SolidWorks PDM is that it&#39;s Windows Explorer based so this is I&#39;m starting with the blank folder structure and really if I want to create a folder structure what I should do is just hit new folder and start building it up so I&#39;m going to create a new maybe Administration folder we&#39;ll do a new folder for projects we&#39;ll do a new folder for maybe Library and yeah that&#39;s pretty good for now so the idea is that you can just go and create new new new folders using that admin login and you can go underneath there and create subfolders but it&#39;s no different than Windows Explorer you can actually drag and drop a folder structure from Windows Explorer as well so pretty straightforwards to get kind of a base structure started the next um the next webinar as well I&#39;ll talk about how we can automate some of that folder structure to keep it nice and organized but that&#39;s kind of the starting point is just getting getting those for those folders started so let&#39;s move on to groups and user permissions I&#39;m going to go back to that Min panel and go in the same Vault that I&#39;m that I just added so we did PDM training test fault and you&#39;ll notice that there&#39;s no groups and the only user is going to be that admin user so in order to start testing out groups and users what you do want to do is create a couple sample users the best way to do that is to right click select new and we can go select from users that we&#39;ve added in the past in this case I&#39;m going to add myself Eric I&#39;ve used it on other volts and you can just hit next and then you have an opportunity to go and add more information about the user so this would be helpful when you are communicating with others and you&#39;re seeing who&#39;s got what checked out it can be really handy to supply their phone numbers or extensions or emails directly in there and that&#39;s just a way to to make sure that people are communicating you know appropriately as they&#39;re you know as they&#39;re navigating around and working with each other I can go through and add all these permissions here but the best way to do it is to add is to add this user to group so I could add them to groups now if there was groups available but I don&#39;t have that available so this is literally all I need to do for a user select okay so now we have two users that Min login and my login Eric let&#39;s go over to groups so groups again is the best way to control permissions and how users interact with the Vault so I&#39;m going to right click select new group and we&#39;ll call this designers select next and then what we can do is go and add the group members so I&#39;m going to add and I&#39;m going to say Eric is going to be one of the designers now when it comes to permissions there&#39;s permissions are broken out into really all these different categories on the left so I don&#39;t have time to go through all of them today but I&#39;m going to go through over over the most critical ones there&#39;s administrative privileges so administrative privileges are ones that you can have partial access to some of the administration that we&#39;re going over today you know just an example of something that you might want some users or power users at least have access to something like search forms you know search forms and search favorites you can have users set up and use those if they obviously if they know what they&#39;re doing but it it really can&#39;t do much harm it&#39;s never going to you&#39;re never gonna lose data you know you&#39;re really just allowing people to be more productive so stuff like that is quite common for us to allocate to uh to broader audience it&#39;s not the nice thing about Administration is that it&#39;s not all or nothing folder MIP permissions are really important in the structure of the Vault I&#39;ve seen this happen a lot where users select the top level of the Vault and they say you know what let&#39;s give all permissions to or permissions to everything in the vault but the biggest thing that I&#39;ve seen or biggest issue I&#39;ve had with that is that the Vault ends up a mess and I find that users when they give too much permissions or companies when they give too much permissions and everybody&#39;s free to do you know what they want it just feels disorganized and it makes people dislike the working in the vault more because they just can&#39;t work efficiently right and find stuff because it&#39;s not not consistent so a better way to go about doing that is going into the individual areas at least at the highest level and what should users do at that level so in this case I&#39;m going to actually I am going to give full permission at these sub levels so at the libraries and at the projects but at the administration I&#39;m not going to give any permission and I&#39;m not even going to give read access for the time being just to just to show you what that looks like you can always monitor the signed folder permissions so you can go through and see which ones are assigned and I can remove them from here as well and that&#39;s kind of a quick way to remove permissions and the nice thing is if you do have um files below this so say you had a specific project that you wanted to remove permissions from it&#39;s actually not an additive thing you can actually it&#39;s it drills down into the subfolder so it always looks at what the closest folder is to where you&#39;re browsing so if I had a project within here I could go in there in the sub project and remove permissions and make it invisible so that&#39;s a common thing for um uh you know for restricting access for higher sensitive data let&#39;s go and take a look what that looks like so to test it out what I&#39;m going to do is log off myself and it&#39;s tough to see this because I&#39;m doing another screen but in the bottom right you can hit in the task pane you can hit the blue dot for your Vault and I&#39;m going to log off my volt and I&#39;m going to log in using my new login so I&#39;ll just show you the login here in a minute so I have my new login and I&#39;m going to log in with Eric okay when you log log off like that um what the in the Windows Explorer area it&#39;s going to automatically boot you back to the desktop the quickest way to browse back to where you were is just hit the back button you&#39;ll right away end up exactly where you were what I wanted to point out is something that&#39;s a very common thing when customers are getting used to PDM for the first time they see a combination of these green folders and these gray folders and it could be gray folders and gray files um this is an important thing to be aware of the green folders are folders that are live access to the Vault the grayed out folders is information which is just cached locally but is not actually have or I don&#39;t actually have there&#39;s no access to that to the Vault right now and no permissions this brings up a really important point that I wanted to talk about groups and users and that when you&#39;re dealing with groups and users if you double click you access all of the permissions but when you right click and go to settings there&#39;s other options available and this is really about the experience of somebody involved it is much less to do with permissions and there&#39;s more to do with preferences so the preferences are in the settings the permissions are in if you double click okay that&#39;s a real real key thing to be aware of when you&#39;re getting used to users and groups again I don&#39;t have time to go through all of these I highly recommend that you know if you&#39;re if you if you&#39;re not taking PDM admin training to make sure to be intimately familiar with the help file but the one that I will point out because it does come up a lot is this Explorer View so if you click on the explore view you can see that I have the option do I want to see all my files show only the files that are part of the file Vault or show only local files in all honesty I&#39;m not sure why this last option exists um it&#39;s kind of ridiculous because who would ever want to see only local cash stuff and not stuff that&#39;s part of the Vault so really these two these top two are the two options and I&#39;m a big fan you know for users who know exactly what they&#39;re doing it&#39;s not a bad idea to see local files because there are rare cases where you might have a local file that you need to go and manually add to the Vault and it&#39;s not added yet and it might be confusing and whatnot but in all honesty for the most part users are better off if they show only files that are part of the file Vault so I&#39;m going to select that as option select ok in order to see that reflected I do actually need to log off and log back in so I&#39;m just going to do that one more time I&#39;m going to log off myself I&#39;m going to log back into the same Vault again actually I can just hit back it&#39;ll force me to log in like so and then you see that Administration folder that was grayed out before is now gone so again just to reiterate that came that came about because um because of that setting so it&#39;s a preference it&#39;s not a permission and it&#39;s important to be aware of both as as you go through let&#39;s keep moving along here again on any of these Topics by the way feel free to type in uh questions if you wanted to see anything more if time permits at the end I&#39;m happy to dive back into them to touch some more I just thought I&#39;d touch on some high level areas just to get more familiar as as we go through so next up is data cards and variables in order to manipulate and work with data cards and variables it&#39;s best to add some file types that we want to experiment with and I&#39;m going to show you this um and I&#39;m going to vote to get an error but I wanted to show you this anyway because it&#39;s an it&#39;s an error that a lot of customers have when they first get started I&#39;m going to drag and drop a file in and you&#39;re going to notice that even though I gave myself full permission on that folder I don&#39;t have permission to add a file to this fault and when you&#39;re getting used to PDM for the first time this can be a very frustrating thing so this is a very key thing that I wanted to to bring up let me browse back to the administration and so forth and I wanted to bring up before I move on to the Ada cards one final thing on groups and users and that&#39;s a really critical thing related to permissions although folder permissions are really important on how somebody can interact with different areas of the Vault and equally as important permission is the state permissions every single file that gets added to the PDM environment is required to be in a workflow and the file needs to hit meet the qualifications of the workflow and the user who&#39;s adding the file needs to have the right permissions for that workflow as well in this case the um what I&#39;m going to do just to kind of shortcut a little bit because I am going to talk a little bit more about workflow at the end of this this webinar and more again in the next webinar afterwards what I&#39;m going to do is I&#39;m going to take State permissions for that group box select every single state in that default workflow and in this case I&#39;m going to give myself full permissions to every single state I am going to maybe back off one notch here and say you know what when it&#39;s approved I actually don&#39;t want every permission I&#39;m going to say I can just read file contents so without getting into all the granular capabilities of what you can do and can&#39;t do at different points of time and what you know the recommendations may be are more or less you know in my opinion you know a good starting point is read file contents that are are approved and other statuses you know if you want flexibility just give full access on the states it&#39;s kind of a good starting point that&#39;s going to be you know avoid some of the frustration um now this isn&#39;t a mandatory one you want to think about who can do what during this um and really this is where you start breaking up into different roles but the transitions is where you um where you pass files from one status to another I&#39;m going to leave them um actually I&#39;m going to give no permissions to Transitions yet because I&#39;m going to talk about that as part of the workflow and I don&#39;t require them to add files so now that I&#39;ve done that I&#39;m going to go back to the vault and add some sample files I&#39;ll just drag and drop some sample files in and you&#39;ll see that now those files are checked out by myself okay so the topic I wanted to focus on now is the next topic is the data card so when you click on a file or if you click on a folder or really if you click on anything in the vaults you get a data card so it&#39;s a really key aspect of the vault is this data card and the data card is what controls the information it comes and it could come from a number of sources it could come from Custom properties of SolidWorks files information could be driven down from a project so all this project information might drive down into the files themselves it could be used in bill of materials or it could be manually entered and it could also be manipulated as part of workflow you know for instance if somebody approves a file their name in the in today&#39;s date should end up on that file as the person that approves it on that date again that&#39;s something I&#39;m doing in the more advanced one but those are examples of of more Advanced Data manipulation so data cards you know are quite important uh to your to your uh Vault setup there&#39;s a pretty decent a good decent one here that you should be aware of but it&#39;s always worthwhile to think about what&#39;s important to me so I&#39;m clicking on a file and I see the data card when you&#39;re working on a data card it&#39;s nice to see the result as you&#39;re working so what I&#39;ve done in the past is just take that file or that folder and just drag that over to the right oh and then when you go into the administration tool and drag that to the left you have an opportunity to go and browse into the cards area so there&#39;s five different types of cards here file cards and folder cards are the ones I just showed you item cards are uh there&#39;s an aspect of the PDM Vault called items that in all honesty a very very small percentage of customers use because most of what you can do in there you can do with virtual files anyhow so I most customers I recommend that they don&#39;t really go towards items because I just don&#39;t see it in an area that SolidWorks is investing in but it&#39;s available and does have does solve some some issues in some goals that customers have search cards are used first for us doing the Performing searches and then template cards are used for launching new new templates to help keep to company standards okay um so let&#39;s go and edit the file cards so I&#39;m going to expand expand the file cards and you can see that in Brackets next to these file cards you can see which files they&#39;re for when I&#39;m clicking on that part you can it&#39;s an sld PRT that&#39;s the card so I have to look for that extension sld PRT and it&#39;s called SolidWorks part card making it really easy to find let&#39;s double click that and now we can start manipulating that card so just a couple uh simple things so first off if there&#39;s things that you&#39;re looking at and you&#39;re like you know what I really don&#39;t see myself using that I&#39;d probably just go ahead and delete it so um now mind you it&#39;s not a bad idea to learn about what these things do before you go deleting them um but uh but a good idea to delete them so let&#39;s let&#39;s take one like design checking as an example I&#39;m going to go and delete those let&#39;s go and delete those two fields I can save that cart okay and I just realized that I don&#39;t have permission to save that card and that&#39;s actually because I&#39;m working with my Eric login instead of admin login so I&#39;m actually going to shift over to that Min login for this as I as I do some of this data card manipulation give me one second so I&#39;m logging off that min and going back or logging off Eric and going back to admin okay so you can actually log off and log in without even leaving this uh this tool which is nice so let&#39;s hit save and now I have permission to save if I want to see the update I can click on that file and I can see that that update so that I don&#39;t have that that information there anymore okay let&#39;s go make another change so say for instance created by author maybe I did want to add an approved buy here so I did want to track approved by so let&#39;s go and add that as a field so I can just drag and manipulate some of these uh this card You Can Box select Fields if you want so let&#39;s go and box select all this information down here so I have a little bit more room and what I&#39;m going to do is actually just take all those fields and do like a control c and a control V just so I have similar information okay like so okay there we go and now these fields you can see that they&#39;re linked to they&#39;re both linked to author and these fields are and the fields on the right are both linked to date that&#39;s obviously not what I want I want to break these out and Link them to different variables so to do that you click on the field and you select from the drop down list of the of the appropriate variables and in this case approved by is available so I can just select it if it&#39;s not available what I&#39;d have to do is hit variables and I&#39;d have to go and add a new variable so I go new variable and add it okay let&#39;s so do the date I&#39;m going to manipulate that one and and change it to a different date so actually what I want to do is change it to approved on is it is a date specific to the approval which is great and then I hit save again go over here click on the file and I can see that my card&#39;s being updated to track the information that I want it&#39;s starting to look a little sloppy so you know it is good to be aware of all these nice tools up here that help me clean up the clean up the card again going a little bit beyond what we&#39;re you know what the scope of what we can cover today but lots of great Tools in order to get a really nice looking date data card and track what you need to the other thing that I wanted to touch on before I move on is the importance of linking information to custom properties so say for instance I had the author and approved by and the dates like the origination date and the proof by date if I wanted those to end up on the title block of a drawing which you know 9 out of 10 customers really do you need to make sure that they&#39;re linked appropriately to the custom properties that you use on your on your SolidWorks drawing so hopefully you know the custom properties that you&#39;re using on your drawing today in this case it&#39;s the part but uh you know on the drawing is um you know obviously would work the same way um and what you need to do is go to the variable for for each one of these so you can hit variables and bring up this variable editor and this right area is how you link it to those custom properties so in this case what this is telling me is that approved on the variable in PDM is linked to a custom property called approved on but it&#39;s only linked for PDFs in all honesty I&#39;m not actually sure why that that&#39;s a default there probably is some stuff related to PDFs where that&#39;s a good default and works out great but in practice the custom properties of PDFs are not nearly as important as a ton of other files mainly SolidWorks and office documentation so let&#39;s just I can add new attributes and Link it if I&#39;m wanted to keep that one but in this case I&#39;m just going to manipulate it so I do want it linked to a custom property that&#39;s correct approved on is not the date that I do or not the custom property I use for my approval date in fact in SolidWorks what I use is a custom property called approved date okay with no space and then you need to add in the extensions which the extensions would you like that to add for sld sdrw and sld PRT that sort of idea um and if you do a lot of these really what you need to do is is have a go-to of this drop down list so this stores kind of all the the key combinations as part of the default and you should have one that you know that you use commonly and there&#39;s no there&#39;s no harm really in having too many extensions here except for that it can be a little bit overwhelming to look at um so it&#39;s nice to see that you want to make sure of course that you get the right one so all my SolidWorks files and if I am going to use the same thing for office documents you want to make sure that your key Office document extensions are in there as well select okay and you&#39;re done so I can&#39;t I&#39;m not going to go to the extent of showing that all in action but that&#39;s a really critical part if I want this field which is Let me refresh that um oh sorry one last thing I forgot to change the text in front so it still says created by and date so I should add I should change that so it&#39;s a little bit more meaningful and I should say approved by and you can keep a date because it&#39;s kind of intuitive that it&#39;s next to approved by um up up to you what uh what you&#39;d like to do there let&#39;s save that and now when I click on a file you can see approved by so again just to reiterate um this field right here if I were to fill fill that in um ideally it&#39;s filled in automatically as part of a workflow but when that gets filled in now that I linked that to the custom property approved date it will it will automatically update that file and update our SolidWorks title block at the same time that&#39;s something actually again I&#39;m going to show in this the next next webinar if you wanted to stay on the line for it okay um so hopefully that was informative for you that for everybody that&#39;s new to PDM Administration so uh again that was kind of some basics of data cards and variables you know there&#39;s obviously a lot a lot more to it but what you need to be aware of is that this is the I call I consider it the heart of PDM because the the data that you&#39;re tracking and how you&#39;re tracking it is going to severely impact how productive you are as a team let&#39;s go on to our last topic of today&#39;s webinar uh which is basic workflows and revision schemes to demonstrate this I&#39;m actually going to switch back again back to um the Eric login because I want to see how the workflows behave as a designer there we go okay so let&#39;s go back all right so the first thing you need to know about workflows is that just to reiterate from before every single file in the vault needs to end up in one workflow or another you know a nice a nice advantage of PDM professional is that you can have an unlimited number of workflows where PDM standard you&#39;re limited to one workflow so in PDM standard all files end up in the same workflow is really the is the only option in PDM professional you can divide up files based on their properties where they&#39;re stored who&#39;s saving them their extensions you know many many different fronts you can divide up files automatically files get added to your workflow um by checking them in so I&#39;m going to hit check in on all those files you can see that PDM is picking up those references you can add a comment so you can say initial check in like so and then you can see that the status column is going to show me the state that those files get added to okay you can see that information in the data card as well because that was called out there so it&#39;s under editing and it&#39;s also seen under the version tab so the version tab shows a little bit more information you can see that the file is under editing and it&#39;s in the default workflow this is actually the only spot where you see the the actual workflow name that that files in okay so how does that look in the background in admin let&#39;s go and back over to the Min side where you can access workflows is right at the bottom of the administration there&#39;s an area workflows and if you double click on your workflow you&#39;ll see this flowchart so this is literally what&#39;s driving those files back and forth so you know really really nice to work with very very intuitive in my opinion but still take some some practice and knowledge to get familiar with and how it works I&#39;m going to um again I can only go over the basics today because I wanted to keep it fairly concise and get you guys started the first thing I want to point out is that that little symbol in the bottom right of under editing the document with that star on it that symbolizes that this is the first status in the workflow if I click on it you can see a check mark for that so if you deselected that and selected a different one you can start with files in a different status if you like and that actually can be handy if you&#39;re migrating a lot of data in sometimes you want to temporarily have them migrated into a different status in which case you can just change that out what your default is so far um I was showing you before that you can control permissions at the group level and you can do it for all the states there but sometimes it&#39;s more intuitive to do it right while you&#39;re working on the workflow itself so the permission that I added for the designers group shows up here so I can see all the permissions that I added for designers and just to reiterate that or if you recall on the approved status I went to designers and the only permission I added was read file contents okay so that&#39;s what we have so far the areas just to get terminology straight these buckets or by boxes sorry are called statuses or States and the arrows in between we call transitions okay um in order to access a transition you do need to have permission to it so in this case there&#39;s under editing and there&#39;s waiting for the only two possible arrows out are submit for approval to go to waiting for approval or no approval required in which it goes straight to approved okay so both of these if I wanted to have access to I&#39;d have to assign a permission this one is really something that&#39;s meant for power users who know that they want to bypass and just move files around um and in my opinion it shouldn&#39;t really be used it&#39;s like why why bother with that so uh in order to have access to this you click on the transition you can add the groups or users that you want to give permission to in this case again I want to set up designers like so and then you click on the group and you permit them okay select ok save the workflow and we&#39;re good so the way that that shows up to the user is a couple spots but to me the most intuitive is just in that right click menu when you right click on a file and go to change State you now have the option to submit it for approval if I wanted to give that other permission so I&#39;ll just temporarily give it just to give an idea so I&#39;ll add the permission for bypass like so hit save so now I just gave that permission to no approval required if I right click now you can see both no approval required or submit for approval so that flowchart again is driving how we interact with those files let&#39;s go and submit that file for approval you have an option here and then you can say please review something like that and change state and then you can see that status changing from under editing to waiting for approval okay if I right click on that file again and go to change State you&#39;ll see that I don&#39;t have permission to approve and that&#39;s because of my role so I&#39;ve only created one group so far designers really the right way to do it is to create a different group of people that would be approving files and give them permission okay if you do have users that approve each other&#39;s work there&#39;s a way to do that without them proving their own work which is nice too but that&#39;s again a little bit beyond what I was planning on covering today let me go uh you know it&#39;s quick enough to do so I&#39;m just going to show you um you know what I&#39;d recommend doing there let&#39;s go and create a new group so I&#39;ll say I&#39;ll call this um well we&#39;ll call that approvers you can call it managers or what you have you okay and the the most you know really the key transition that you want to give them is um uh past approval so this one so it goes from waiting approval to approve so past approval is permitted and the group members just as a like you know usually it&#39;s different users typically but in this case I&#39;m going to add permission to Eric as well so not only is my login Eric a designer but I also have permission to approve so now that I have permission to do that I can right click go to change State and I have past approval so it&#39;s a really key thing to be aware of that the administrative privileges don&#39;t necessarily have to come from a single group you can divide that up and use use some strategy depending on the size and and functionality that you&#39;d like to accomplish with your team when I pass approval you know write a comment looks good select OK you&#39;ll see that that file goes from waiting for approval to approved the other really key thing that&#39;s happening in the background is the history so as we did that you can see we&#39;re building up a file and a history of like the comments along the way who did what and in this case it&#39;s all done by my One login and the last thing I wanted to point out is that at the end of the workflow um so far now that it&#39;s approved it&#39;s stamped with revision a so a really really critical part to working in PDM and the best practice hands down is to have workflow Drive the revision now there&#39;s ways around it you can try to do it without and just you know click and bump revision but in my opinion it&#39;s not the way you should be working workflow no matter how simple you make it should be the way that you drive and increment revision and that&#39;s the best way to drive a build up history as it controls permissions and it really keeps everybody you know working correctly as that as they work collaboratively together so if anybody ever has a different opinion on that I&#39;m happy to discuss you know where you know what might be uh might be Alternatives but you know ideally you know in all honesty what I&#39;m going to do is probably convince you that workflow is the is the best way to go okay I&#39;m going to show you how that works and I want to show you an example of changing revision scheme to end off this webinar first of all how that works this workflow that came with this default vault as it went through the past approval transition there was an action that took place there&#39;s two actions actually the first action was setting the variable revision with the next revision counter why do we need to do that is so that it ends up on the title block when we&#39;re printing that file so that&#39;s mainly for drawings if you drive that down in there if you were to print a drawing after it&#39;s been approved it&#39;ll have the correct revision on the title block the next action is bumping the revision so it&#39;s an increment revision action and then there&#39;s a tab here for revision numbers and you can say that the the revision number that I&#39;m incrementing is their Alpha revision component okay so that&#39;s how it bumps let&#39;s go see what it takes to change that to numeric and just get a sense and get a little bit more grasp of how revisions work out in the administration side there&#39;s revision components and revision numbers now I could go and create new components and new numbers but then I&#39;d have to go and update my workflow to start using those new number names and new numbers most customers only have one one revision scheme so you know usually what I do is take the existing one or out of the box one the alpha revision component and just rename it name it because Alpha doesn&#39;t really make sense in fact I can just take out Alpha and I can call it revision number and in the back end you know the Administration has set up such that that doesn&#39;t break anything you know it&#39;s you it&#39;s all pointed correctly and and uh works well same thing for the the component you can take the alpha revision component you can call that revision component and instead of alpha that&#39;s that a b c there I can just back out and I can choose a different counter so I can go to number pick a two digit number in this case I use I like personally the idea of starting at zero and select ok so now we have a revision number and it uses the revision component and if I go into my workflow you&#39;ll see that the counter is using um oops that needs to be refreshed does use the right one I promise the counter is going to be using the revision component as well okay so how does that behave let&#39;s go into the files right click on one of the the SolidWorks files submit it for approval okay let&#39;s do okay so that&#39;s waiting for approval and when I right click and pass approval select ok it goes to approved again the difference is that instead of alpha we&#39;re getting zero zero so you can see local revision component in the history you can see Zero Zero and if you were to go to the data card you&#39;re going to see 0 0 as well the data card just to reiterate is the revision component the revision variable that drives down into the file so that it can print properly and shows a right revision when you go to print it&#39;ll just take a moment to review the questions as well

Transcript for:PDM Administration Training

Transcript for:
PDM Administration Training