Hi All:

I've gone through all of the questions I could find regarding configurations and PDM Standard without finding one that addressed my current question, so if you please..

We've been using PDM Standard for about 1 1/2 years with no major problems. We have recently completed a major design change to a flagship product that involved 20 or so minor changes. There were enough changes that we now call this product "Version B". This product has 4 major subassemblies, of about 50 parts each. Each of these subassemblies is a configured assembly file. Each file has it's own set of PDM data cards with tabs for each configuration. The major design change has generated several new configurations in each of these subassembly files, along with their associated data card tabs. Now I am being asked if there is a way we can remove the old, now unused configurations, to make working with these files faster. Yes, we can and have suppressed things in the files, but when performing many functions in SW you still get the full list of configurations, making the file cumbersome.

So I was wondering if anyone has tried to delete old unused configurations out of assembly files contained in PDM Standard? I think that once that is done, we will be unable to roll back to a previous version that had that configuration in it, but maybe not. If we can't roll back, I'm ok with that, I just would like to know what to expect. If I delete the unused configurations is that going to cause a database crash since the history now points to configurations that are no longer there? I'm guessing the history remains regardless. What are the data cards going to do now that the configurations are gone, disappear or cause a crash?

I considered archiving the old assembly files and basically starting new. Considering that we save all previous drawing revs as pdf's and create ECO's for changes, we have a good record of all changes. So, I'm not really interested in saving these old configurations for posterity.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!