PDMWE with Virtual parts

I recently talked about this on the CAPUniversity blog, which has a posting to a video:  http://blog.capinc.com/2010/08/virtual-components-in-the-land-of-pdm/

Here is the summary:

In the land of SolidWorks Assemblies exists a funny creature called the “Virtual Component”.  Virtual components are typically used in top-down design when you need to create a new part in the context of an existing assembly. During the conceptual design process, when you frequently experiment with and make changes to the assembly structure and components, using virtual components has several advantages over the bottom-up design method as explained by the SolidWorks help system online:

• You can rename these virtual components in the FeatureManager design tree, avoiding the need to open, save as a copy, and use the Replace Componentscommand.
• You can make one instance of a virtual component independent of other instances in a single step.
• The folder where you store the assembly is not cluttered with unused part and assembly files resulting from iterations of component designs.

Workgroup PDM will certainly let you add an assembly with a Virtual Part, but it has no means for really tracking it beyond the where used report.   There is a setting to turn this on in the User Options, but selecting this option has significant performance impact. and since a virtual part is usually only used relative to one design, this setting may have a low return on investment.

Enterprise PDM actually handles these quite nicely and if a virtual component is being used, it is shown in the check in dialog box in reports as well as the BOM tab, which is really where you want it displayed.

This is relatively new stuff for PDM to track and I think you need EPDM 2009 or higher for this to work...