Process Question About Attachments

[JimTenHoven]

We are about to begin using Windchill workflow for change management and would like to get input from some experienced users whether to vault (check-in) supporting documents or not. Examples of these documents are BOM mark-ups, cost sheets, new part number requests, drawing mark-ups (not ProductView red-lines), etc.

On one hand, we think vaulting will provide better document control. Any editing of a document while a change is in process will be identified by iteration.

An opposing view is that long term, we will have a very large number of documents in our product containers related to completed change requests that have little or no on-going value.

Which do you think is best practice and why?

Regards,

Jim

[MatthewKnight]

I'm going to use terminology that doesn't really mesh with the words you've chosen.

First... Yes. Check them in/Attach them to WTDocuments/Change objects. For change management especially, you'll want to know who did what, when they did it, and why they did it.

By default, your attachments (secondary/primary content) will be stored as blobs in the database. And you're right, that will take up a lot of space. So you'll want to enable file vaulting on your Windchill box. Doing so will not affect your database size very much and you can manage the backups with an additional file system backup tool. I *think* that WC does not create duplicate items in the vault/filesystem if they have not changed but I'm not sure.