Under the Hood

PLM Tip of the Week - Linking Workspaces in PLM 360

“That rug really tied the rooms together,”   -The Dude Lebowski

Today’s post will cover some best practices in tying linking data together within PLM 360. Items from one Workspace can call upon and provide a link to items in another Workspace. There are a number of ways to do this, and the advantages include ease of navigation, removing duplicate data entry, and (intended) transparency of information within PLM 360. First, we’ll examine the use of picklists to draw Workspaces together:

Linking Picklists

A Picklist is a drop down of predefined values used during data entry. They display in a variety for forms such as single choice, radio button, check box, and multiple choice to name a few. The advantage is the predefined nature of them, allowing user to select rather than type in values. A Linking Picklist takes that a step further and provides access to Items in another Workspace of your choice. During configuration of a field, choosing Linking Picklist will lookup values available in the other Workspace and establish a link, thus the name.

What’s even better is that Picklists are global in your PLM tenant. Meaning good, well built Picklists that reference other Workspaces can be used over again in another field, another Workspace.

 

Relationships Tab

The Relationships tab is yet another way to establish links between Workspaces. This tab is enabled through adding permissions on the role of a Workspace. Once enabled, anyone with permission can add a direct link to an Item from another Workspace and establish this as either bi-directional or uni-directional from the active to the related Item.

Workspace Relationships setting on the Workspace

Building upon the previous paragraph, the Workspace Relationship setting on each Workspace allow the administrator to link multiple Workspaces to each other. Certain tabs actually lend themselves to Item relationships as in the image below. Project Management tabs need other projects, tasks, and activities to link to, forming a project gantt chart. Bill of Materials needs BoM items, Revisioning Workspaces need Revision controlled items, and the Relationships tab needs well, something to relate to.

Scripting

Finally, Workspaces can be tied together through the use of an action script that spawns a new item in a difference Workspace. This in turn provides a direct link back to the item from whence it came. A great example of this is an Inspection that leads to a Non conformance, which leads to a Corrective action.

This can even extend from the Corrective action to a Change Request and onto a Change Order. At each step, a link back to the item record that spawned it is available for audit trail purposes.

 

-Brian Schanen

Autodesk Vault Upgrade Documentation

Attention Autodesk Vault administrators, consultants, power users, and fans. New documentation is available that outlines best practices for upgrading Autodesk Vault. An F.A.Q. along with a white paper on the recommended procedures are all included on the Autodesk Vault Wiki site.

Details on upgrading Autodesk Vault can be found on our Wiki http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Vault/enu/Help/Help/0206-Autodesk206/0261-Upgradin261

Special thanks to Ross, Irvin, Martin, and Sara. Nice work!

PLM 360 Video Spotlight - Users, Groups, and Roles

This week’s video highlight involves a crucial step in the setup and configuration of your PLM 360 site: user access and security. This tutorial is aimed at the administrative role within Autodesk PLM 360 and includes an overview of how users are added to groups, and groups are assigned to roles.

Throughout the video I’ve also included some best practices on naming of roles and user inclusion into groups. Enjoy!

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/PLM_360/enu/community/Videos/Adding_Users_and_Setting_Up_Groups

-Brian Schanen

PLM 360 Tip of the Week - Picklist Management

Picklists in PLM 360 are global drop downs that provide a variety of benefits including standardizing data entry and easily linking Workspaces to one another. These can be created on-the-fly during field creation in a Workspace OR outside of Workspace setup. Access is administrative only, and is found through the Administration menu.

Once in setup, choose the General tab (as this is a global setting) and click Picklist Manager

Within this area, you have the ability to create a new list. When creating Picklists that are driven from other Workspaces consider prefixing them with a something common − like [WS] List Name − to easily identify which ones come from Workspaces.

The Picklists also have the option to Edit (add rows, modify Descriptions), to Delete, and to perform a Where Used. That is especially useful to leverage before you delete a Picklist. The Where Used query will Display the Workspace where its used, which Tab, and which Field, making this a very useful lookup.

-Brian Schanen

Video Spotlight - Configuring your PLM 360 site

Today’s video spotlight covers the first day with your new PLM 360 site. This is typically the setup day, where you move in, make yourself comfortable, and have a look around. Topics include logging in, editing the logo, Main Menu designer, and other global configuration options. This focuses on Administrative tasks in PLM 360, so if you’re the one customizing the site, this video is for you. Enjoy!

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/PLM_360/enu/community/Videos/Configuring_Your_Site

-Brian Schanen

PLM 360 Tip of the Week - Workflow Transition and State Naming

Hello PLM 360 fans, it’s time to roll out some tips/tricks/techniques for configuring PLM 360. In the tradition of this blog, I’ll have at least one of these tips per week that will help you both administer and use Autodesk PLM 360 to its fullest. This first one is foundational. And don’t worry if you’ve already built out some Workflows – you can simply go in and change this anytime.

When creating and naming Workflow, a great way to determine which order a transition shows up in the Workflow drop down is by prefixing the transitions with a numeric value such as [01].

When you have multiple transitions out of a single state you can use a model like [01a], [01b], [01c].

This is also very helpful with Workflow states when setting up Milestones based on these states. They will appear in the order you expect. It's also useful for Reporting so you have the ability to sort by Workflow states.

 

 

-Brian Schanen

Autodesk Vault Courseware Mobilized

Hello Vault users, aficionados, enthusiasts. Coming up, we’ll be featuring some additional contributors to the Blog, covering all things Autodesk Vault (and more). Today’s post comes from Irvin Hayes – Technical Product Manager for Autodesk Data Management – regarding something he ran across at AU 2011 in the exhibit hall:

Ascent has the training material you need to learn about the Autodesk Vault Family of Products. Now when you purchase training material from Ascent, you can get softcover books or use an eBook that will work on your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone.  Ascent offers detailed training material for all for levels of Autodesk Vault along with example data to use. In addition, Ascent also offers training material for a variety of Autodesk products. 

If you are looking for a new digital way to go through training software without lugging books around, have a look at Ascent’s estore new way to learn Vault here.

Vault Implementation Lessons Learned

Greetings Autodesk Vault fans. It's about this time of year that I see an increase in Vault deployments. Be it end of summer, everyone back from holiday, or just the natural cycle of our products, the activity level is up. And this is a good thing. Well I too am back in the swing of things, and have some notes to share with the Vault community.

I was sequestered away at a customer site this summer at a large Vault deployment - Vault Pro, Full Replication, Job Server(s), Items, ECO's, even SharePoint integration. Pretty much the Vault combo plate. I've put together list of 'lessons learned' that hopefully will benefit the Vault Community. I will also have some guest writers from our DM team submitting material, so stay tuned.

First, let's discuss some must-have utilities for any Vault Workgroup, Collaboration, or Professional implementation. The first one I'll highlight is Visual Lifecycle Status. This is a must have utility for not only using Document Lifecycles daily, but in your validation or QA cycle of your Vault deployment. This will cut your validation cycle significantly by being able to see all Lifecycle options based on your permission level.

A new tab is added in the History window, and when a file is selected, a variety of details appear. The states appear cascading down, with the current one highlighted in yellow. Adding to the fun is a grid mapping of transitions, complete with a description of actions in the left pane.

You can verify you’ve set up the lifecycle definition properly by quickly running around the grid and looking for allowed transitions (image above) and blocked transitions (image below).

We found this to be as useful for Vault Admins to test and troubleshoot as it is easy for Vault users to move files along their Lifecycle. Hope you enjoy this app as much as I did – it’s actually quite fun to use. You can download and read more here on the Visual Lifecycle Status utility.

-Brian Schanen

Flexibility and Improvements in Autodesk Vault

New Vault Summer school videos are uploaded to TheVaultKnowsAll and ready for your viewing. Introducing Module 6: Flexibility and Improvements with Autodesk Vault. This is a 5 part video module that covers: File Management enhancements, Job Server, Item Master improvements, and Item Export options.

Of special note on this playlist is File Resolution Enhancements with Autodesk Vault 2012. This features a side-by-side comparison of Vault Professional 2011 and Vault Professional 2012 the same actions being performed in each to showcase enhancements in the 2012 release. Note that these changes apply to all of the Vault 2012 products. Enjoy!

-Brian Schanen

Autodesk Vault Video Series on CAD Integrations

Introducing a new series of Vault tutorials posted to TheVaultKnowsAll: Module 3, Capturing your Concepts with Autodesk Vault. This is a 10 part video module that covers a day-in-the-life from a CAD users perspective. Topics include In-CAD access to Vault Projects, Visual Data Management, Revision Table integration, and Sheet Set Manager integration.

-Brian Schanen