We are making a big push at our small company to get everyone using Workgroup PDM, but we are having a hard time coming up with a good file naming scheme.

We are a small (~10 SW users) R&D company which means we do a lot of concept CAD work and one-off prototyping.  Most projects move pretty quickly, as most R&D work does.  We only have a handful of actual products that have made it to any sort of manufacturing stage, and even then it is limited run productions.  It is also very common to grab old models to use with new and similar projects.

From what we understand, the filenames are completely arbitrary, as long as they are all unique.  Then the parts can be sorted and organized by part/assembly metadata.  The easiest method seems to just to have file names be numbers, which increase sequentially with each new part/assembly (regardless of what project they are for).  The problem we see with that is having a good way of "checking out" numbers to use.  If PDM was able to name the file for us, using the next available number, then that would be great.  Otherwise we have to worry about users potentially using the same number.

We talked about putting a project code in the file name, but that gets messy when one part is used on another project.  Or maybe assigning blocks of numbers to each user, then it is up to them to keep track of their own number sequence when they name files.

We are hoping someone with similar needs has an elegant solution that we can adopt.  Any input is appreciated!