Ability to share design data to multiple folders with in the same project

[mmathew]

Ability to share design data to muliple folders with in the same project.

This ability will help customers if they follow the below strategy for Product Data Collaboration with external design partners and suppliers.

For a product that has multiple external collaborating entities (suppliers, design partners) , there is only a single project related to the product and multiple folders are created for managing suppliers with in the same project. say folder1 for supplier1. folder2 for supplier2, folder3 for designPartner3 etc... And collaborating partner users have access only to their folders. And there is often a business need to share the same design data with multiple partners. Which means that we need to be able to share the same data to multiple folders in the same project, which OOTB seems to be restricted for now.

[sm]

Yes, this is a restriction of the current Sharing implementation. Objects can only be shared to different projects, but not to the same project in different folders. Both use cases make sense, but the later is not supported yet.

Please vote or comment if this capability is desirable.

[mmathew]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the response.

The restriction is because of the fact that the 'SHAREDCONTAINERMAP' stores the Version reference of the shared object against the Project to which it is shared. That means, another workaround for this problem would be to revise the object and share to the same project again. But that does not make any real sense even though I can technically get around the sharing restriction.

I am looking at customization options to get this done even though that looks a bit difficult and heavy as several layers will need to be bypassed.

But before going down on that track, I wanted to know why it was designed like this? Will there be any impact if I bypass the ''is already shared to the same project' check?

If you happen to know the design intent, could you please share that? Or if you know of anybody who might know the answer to my question, please add them to this thread or share his/her contact. I tried logging a support case for getting an answer to this, but that is not helping much.

Thanks and Regards

Midhun Mathew