Delete non-latest Iterations

[MikeLockwood]

There is an action: Delete non-latest Iterations. We have been experimenting with this lately. In general, it works for some. It removes far fewer Iterations than it seems that it should (fortunately not more).

Tech support sort of gave up on it working - they advise using Purge. But - Purge is an admin function. We'd like to make using this action part of releasing documents in general, and have non-admin users execute it.

Question: Does anyone have experience using this? Comments?

[bellj]

We limit any delete action and reserve Delete non-Latest for the occasional oops.
I've never used Purge. We generally don't delete anything.

joe bell
GSIMS Administrator
GPS Sustainment Information Management System
719-474-8899
bellj@gpssims.com<">mailto:bellj@gpssims.com>

[DarrenStorey]

Hi Mike

Really this is just purge applied to a specific document, perhaps PTC are just compensating for the fact that the actual administrative purge action cannot be applied to specific docs. The selection criteria filters don't allow this level of control (not in 9.1 at least)

Darren

[amansfield]

Mike:

I have been using it for AutoCAD files as part of the release process. We don't have the AutoCAD workgroup manager so our AutoCAD files are treated as document files and using "Delete Non-Latest Iterations" gets rid of the "phony" x.1 iteration plus other unecessary later ones. I haven't had any issues using it so far (WC 10.0)

This is a "admin-only" capability. Regular users cannot delete anything:Ilearned the hard way back in the Intralink 2.x days that most users pay little attention to data management and do dumb things, like deleting the contents of an entire product folder thinking it was one of their workspaces..

Sometimes I wish that there was a similar delete function for CAD documents as the purge command is frightening to use and as such is only used in the rarest of occasions to get rid of a small number of items.

Andrew Mansfield

[sdrzewiczewski]

One use case is to clean up mistakes made in previous iterations, such as bad associations.

[MikeLockwood]

The business case is to reduce vault disk space just a bit. We recently purged about ¾ TB (first time ever running Removed Unreferenced Files from the vault UI).
Need to wait just a bit before a major upgrade occurs on vault disk space.

We have some WTDoc's with a zillion iterations prior to Released. Will focus on those for now, then make it a routine practice to get rid of them at release.

We give users Delete only at the first state (not "In Work" but similar).

It's just curious that the action executes and in fact does remove some iterations, but not all that you would expect. There are no messages. After executing, the action is gone from the menu for that document.

[avillanueva]

To reduce disk space, I would use this using purge command to make global sweeps. On a per item basis, this action is useful to remove links to old items for deletion. Also, if you have items with huge attachments or files, those can be identified down to the object and that object alone can be "purged" using this method.

[SimonLucas]

You can always purge individual items by temporarily moving them to a different folder, then purging just that folder. Have used this to fix dodgy associations on a couple of occasions.

Simon Lucas