Background: Our company works on pretty complex assemblies (5000+ parts) with several teams working on subassemblies and parts that belong in the master assembly. We are transitioning from Workgroup PDM to Solidworks PDM. Almost all the parts and assemblies are checked out by other users.

Question: In workgroup I typically would download the master assembly (that is checked out to another user) to my local folder, add my parts/assemblies that I am designing and modify the master assembly as needed, then saving my changes to my local folder. I would be able to track my changes manually and "get latest" to the master assembly or other assemblies or parts that are pertinent to my design. I would save my changes locally and update the master assembly when I am close to completion or whether I want to "reset" all the changes that I made when I download the latest files. With Solidworks PDM the local view and vault view are the same. I can't save the changes to the master assembly because it is checked out to our others so PDM won't let me. The workaround that I use so far is that I work offline to make the changes that I want but that seems counter intuitive. Any changes that I make are sometimes written over because PDM gets latest version automatically. Should I be changing my design process completely or is there a way to turn off get latest? I'd like to control when my local vault updates itself.