Windchill Document Management - Naming/Number Best Practices

[lhoogeveen]

For Windchill Documents, how do people usually handle naming/numbering (Number, Name, Primary Content File Name) with Windchill Documents?

• Is it possible to drive the Primary Content File Name from the Number and/or Name of the Document? Is keeping these in sync worth worrying about?
• Thoughts on using smart Numbering like TR00001 for Type = Test Reports?
• The default Document Numbering (ex: 0000000001) seems like it would create questions like is this also Document 1?. Also, Excel like to strip of leading zeros.
• Other lessons learned or best practices?

[BrianToussaint]

We use a lot of soft types for our documents.  The main reason is so that we can kick off approval workflows specific to those types of documents upon document creation.  We do then use specific numbering conventions for those soft types for the most part.  For example test reports start with TR and followed by a number.  For some of them I also create their own library to make setting up teams and ACLs easier.  Some documents we don't care what the number is or if it has their own soft types or not.  For those we just use the standard numbering system and default type.  We have 9 different soft types now that span different types of documents and even one just for a workflow for making a model shop request.  It was an easy way to get what we needed into an approval routing.  With document classification now in 11.2+, we will be looking at putting more documents in Windchill and using classification also.

[lhoogeveen]

@BrianToussaint Thanks for the info!

Does Windchill Document Classification require a Windchill Premium licenses? Or just Windchill Base?

Do you try to keep the Document Name in sync with the Primary Content File Name?

[BrianToussaint]

@lhoogeveen 

I do not know anymore with the license changes as I bought mine before the change and have old licensing.  But with the old licensing I had to buy licenses for classification for my heavy users that will be using it.  However in testing my users that are in the PDMLink Module License Group can see classification based on the profile for that group.  So if they are not supposed to be able to use it without the classification license, I do not know why they can see it based on that profile.  I don't know if anyone there knows either.

No, we do not try to keep those two names in sync.

[ScottMorris]

If you are using PartsLink, work with your sales team to understand which license model you are buying, which items are optional and which items are required. We have the Author, Contributor, View Only license model and I believe we were required to buy PartsLink for all Author licenses.

• Use of classification search (Classification Explorer) does not require a license
• The ability to set and change classification requires a license

[BrianToussaint]

@ScottMorris - That makes sense then.  I have it for all of my users that change/create new parts in engineering.  Thank you for the clarification.

[FrighteningFlow]

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@BrianToussaint wrote:

WalgreensListens - That makes sense then.  I have it for all of my users that change/create new parts in engineering.  Thank you for the clarification.

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I bought mine before the change and have old licensing.  But with the old licensing I had to buy licenses for classification for my heavy users that will be using it.  However in testing my users that are in the PDMLink Module License Group can see classification based on the profile for that group.  So if they are not supposed to be able to use it without the classification license, I do not know why they can see it based on that profile.