Windchill folder structure best practice

[MikeLockwood]

Don't really need folders at all in the sense that you needed them in Intralink 3.x, or in Windows.



But - It is helpful to use folders and direct pretty much all objects to them via OIR such that the Folders view of each context loads quickly. No real need beyond this to have nested folders.



Some people use folders for more precise access control - this may apply.



But - In general users LOOOOOOOVVVVEEEE using lots of folders, deeply nested. May want to restrict Folder (object type for ACL: subFolder) create permission.

[DarrenStorey]

"In general users LOOOOOOOVVVVEEE using lots of folders"...... Oh yes they do!

We have a product with over 2500 folders!!!!We have same stratergy, a folder for each object type referenced by OIR. This also allows a different default table display view for each type. Beyond that I would be quite happy to ban the creation of folders, but this would certainly make me very unpopular.

[HugoHermans]

People search for approaches to solve their needs. Since they know folders, they use folders (if they can). I didn't allow users to create folders and subfolders in Windchill, but I lacked to provide an alternative for them. For articles for example (WTParts), they now rely on a kind of logic in the numbering :-(, they have spreadsheets :-(, they have their notebooks ...

I would be interested how other organisations solves this. In Windchill with Baselines or Managed Collections? Or outside of Windchill?

Regards, Hugo.

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[DarrenStorey]

You "can" use baselines to store adhoc data, but I think managed collections are better suited. Baselines are good for creating a permanent snapshot of an evolving configuration. The real benefit of managed collections comes when youleverage the ability to automatically gather data which is structurally dependent or just related. You can also easily refresh the collection contents, for example update with latest versions or gather new dependents.

People see in Windchill what looks like files, and think "Windows Explorer", rather than seeing data and thinking "Database". It's a mind-set, and old habits die hard.

[cc-2]

Hi guys

I agree with all your comments, old habits are hard to kill, folders in WC do not have the same purpose than in windows etc so I will not duplicate the comments

I will instead tell what i have done.

We came from intralink (we had 4 servers) and of course thousands of folders. It took all the preparation before go live amd that took a good years to explain the purpose of the folders in WC.

I won the battle for our products also thanks to the fact that our products were more or less global and the design teams understood that products had to be managed globally. But i lost it for tooling where they saw themself as local. Kind of my tool is for this machine here nothing to do with a simular machine on another site. So

for our products we had a product context per design authority and for the folders we has one for wtpart, one for cad files, one for documents, and one for promotion request, . As per Hugo, no one could create folders

for tooling , well one context only , a folder per site and each site could have what they wanted, after a few years, many people, especially new recruit put all the data in the top level folder of the site,proving that they had stopped using folders as they used to. Sometimes, it just needs to give it time.

That is formy side I think