Have anyone successful get power in charge to decide to leave SW ?

[bnemec]

What's the issue there, bnemec?

What JSculley said. While I understand that having the read only flag set on the file causes CAD to glitch in some ways, manually clearing or setting that flag will likely cause the PDM Admin to glitch. If the user knows exactly what they're doing and always clean up and put things back when they're done they can do it without causing problems; but one misstep and we're off the PDM rails.

One thing I hate about it is when I'm just looking at some product, doing some simple, quick edits (what if type stuff) SW refuses to let me edit a component from the assembly. I have intentions of checking the file out or saving changes. There's a few other times SW chokes with locked files.

[Frederick_Law]

Manually altering the 'Read-only' flag on a file controlled by a PDM system is generally a big no-no. Most likely, the system has no idea that you manually tweaked it, and still thinks the file is read-only. Setting/unsetting that flag may be only a small portion of what the system does as part of a normal check-in/out process.

PDM will say "local file modified".
That user will use local file, all other users will use PDM version.
That user can check out that file and update PDM.
Or delete local file.

Autodesk Vault allow modify local file without check out.

[SPerman]

WIth the database used with IDEAS, you did all of your work locally. The server didn't know anything about it until you checked it in. That was really nice, but we had some users that weren't great at checking parts in when they were done, which affected other users and assemblies.

It also allowed you to open assemblies a number of different ways, including "as saved" which was also nice.

[mike miller]

WIth the database used with IDEAS, you did all of your work locally. The server didn't know anything about it until you checked it in. That was really nice, but we had some users that weren't great at checking parts in when they were done, which affected other users and assemblies.

It also allowed you to open assemblies a number of different ways, including "as saved" which was also nice.

That's the same way our Teamcenter/Solid Edge works. When you open a file it downloads to your local disk. When you check it out, you get write access locally and in TC (such as for metadata), and it locks it for other users obviously. Now you can make all the changes you want, and save them, without affecting the Teamcenter version or other users. Only when you check in or upload do they find out what you did. And Solid Edge has an option for automatically checking in files when closing.

I don't know how other PDM systems do it, but TC uses revision rules to control what is loaded into an assembly. When you select Precise Only you will see the exact as-saved state of that assembly. When you select Working;Any Status you will first see WIP, unless there is none and in that case you will see the latest released.

Also, TC lets you roll back within revisions. You can get the older version of a WIP file up to 3 checkouts ago (this number depends on the system settings) in case you messed up and happened to upload it.