Lifecycle Basic Concepts
An Introduction to Lifecycle Management
SmarTeam - Community Workspace enables you to maintain and manage any information
related to a revision manageable object throughout its lifecycle. By mirroring the
physical process of product management, SmarTeam - Community Workspace uses vaults,
check in, check out, and release functions to manage lifecycle revisions of manageable objects. It creates new versions of a file and protects it from unauthorized modifications.
Maintaining security and control over files is of the utmost importance. SmarTeam - Community Workspace creates new versions of each object as it is revised and protects it from unauthorized modifications. The electronic vault ensures that only those persons with access permission may access a file, and that a file cannot be accessed by more than one person at a time.
SmarTeam - Community Workspace provides for lifecycle management of an object together with all its components (children). This option is crucial to the proper management of an Assembly and all its sub-Assemblies. SmarTeam - Community Workspace enables you to perform any revision operation on an object and all its children simultaneously as defined in the SmarTeam database. For example, if you have an Engine that has many children, you can perform any revision operation (such as Check In, Check Out, Release) on the Engine together with all its components simultaneously.
Basic Concepts
SmarTeam - Community Workspace revision management features enables you to carry out the following operations:
- Automate the flow of objects and all other revision manageable objects through different stages of development.
- Control and access the many revisions of an object.
- Save and restrict access to files using an electronic vault.
- As you revise an object, drawing or assembly, you can carry out the following lifecycle operations:
- Check out the file from the vault (using the Check Out option) in order to modify it and launch it in its original application. When a file is checked out of the vault, it can only be modified by the current user.
- Check in the object to the vault for safekeeping, using the Check In option. When an object is checked in to the vault, it is made publicly available to other users.
- Copy a file to your working directory in order to view it. In this case, you cannot modify the file, and the original file remains in the vault. This option is helpful when another user is modifying a file, but you want to view it through SmarTeam on your working directory.
- Release the object by placing its file in the Released vault, using the Release option. The object can then be checked out for modification, using the New Release option, but only after creating a new revision.
SmarTeam - Community Workspace ensures that the integrity of the Assembly and its children is not jeopardized by disabling lifecycle operations. The following examples show how SmarTeam - Community Workspace protects the integrity of an Assembly.
- When you Release an Assembly, its children must be released as well. For example, if an object has several children, each child object must be assigned the Released state.
- You can perform a revision operation on an Assembly and all its children simultaneously, using the Propagate Operation option. For example, if you wish to check out a Watch and all its 10 sub-Assemblies, you can check them all out simultaneously.
- You have the option to perform a revision operation on an Assembly and not on its children, or perform a revision operation on a child and not on the parent Assembly.
- You can check out an Assembly from the vault and leave the children in the vault.
- You can copy the children of an Assembly to your working directory so that you can view them but not modify them. The status of the children remain Checked In, while the status of the Assembly is Checked Out.
- You can check a sub-Assembly out of the vault independently and leave the parent Assembly in the vault.