Howdy,
I am one of two designers at a small eng/mfg firm. We are not presently using PDM, and looking for simple solutions to avoid that eventuality.
Up until I was hired, 2 yrs back, there was only 1 designer and everything lived on his local system, and was replicated to a cloud backup after hours.
Now, with me in the mix we'd like to move to using shared/network storage that we can both access simultaneously & looking for hints on avoiding stepping on the other designers feet, and avoiding overwriting newer files accidentally.
Sure. We should use PDM. Except we are a small shop & no onsite IT to manage such a system, so that is precisely what we are trying to avoid.
Typically we don't both work on the same projects, but some projects may use shared/standardized components like laser cut parts or nuts and bolts.. Right now, we both have copies of a "standard parts" dir on our local systems and that has been working.. if one of us makes a change to that dir, or files therein, we just tell the other guy to pull updated copies from the cloud.
A little bit of experimentation has shown that there are plenty of "File In Use" warnings if a file is open on another system. So, I guess its just on us both to make sure we notify the other of any changes to files in that "standard parts" directory.
Any other ideas?
Thanks!
I'd recommend you should have PDM standard (a new version of wPDM) which you can prevent identical parts and better revision tracking
if you own pro. or premium SW lic along with manual subscription, then PDM standard is included without any extra cost