- [Instructor] In this video we're going to take a look
at the interface for PDM in Windows Explorer.
Let's jump in and check it out.
Right here on the side in the left
you'll notice that we have the vault
that I installed previously.
You can always tell by the little blueberry icon.
So I'm going to click on this, and I'm already logged in.
And you'll see here the interface.
So this is everything that's going on.
This is PDM, when we talk about PDM
in the Windows Explorer.
So let's start at the top
and then we'll work our way down and across.
So first we have a set of actions that we can do.
So for each file we can do things like edit it,
check in, check out, get different versions.
If you accidentally check a file out
and don't make any changes you can undo a check out.
You can also generate some items
or browse to a specific item.
If we move over we can modify things.
The typical Windows copy, paste, type items,
but then we also have, related to our workflows,
changing states and changing categories,
updates, and labels.
We can change our display.
If we want to show bills of materials,
if we want to show files, if we want to show search results.
We have all these options.
So we go across.
We here have the tool section.
Now if you know that, for example,
you're going to be working on a laptop with your PDM
and you're going to be taking it home for the evening
or you're going to be leaving for a trip,
you can come down here to the work off-line area.
And when you do that you sign out of PDM,
but you still get access to all the files in your cache
and you can work offline, take your work,
leave your network, come back,
and then switch this back to work online.
So let's run through that once.
So we clicked work offline.
Does a little thinking here.
Now if we go back into the vault,
you'll notice all of my folders turned from green to blue.
This is the indication that we're working offline.
So if you're ever looking through your PDM vault
and noticing that the files aren't the most current,
you're not getting the versions,
you're not able to load things,
take a look at your folders.
Maybe you're working offline.
Go back into tools, and very simply click
work on-line.
And it'll switch modes back into online.
So pretty easy there.
Moving across, we have the Windows view icons,
which I just leave on details because you want to see
all of your PDM categories.
Here we have the search options.
So you can do various types of searches.
You can create custom searches pretty easily.
You click on the search icon,
and you can search by names and locations,
information found on the card,
different variables, if a file is checked in or out.
So if you're doing an upgrade or an installation
and you want to check and see who's got files
checked out still in your vault that need to be checked in,
you can search by checked in, checked out.
You can search by versions, comments,
different states and workflows,
by labels, by different text comments
that you put in the history.
And also just by pure content.
So pretty powerful search tool.
You can do a lot of stuff with that.
For example, let's do a quick search in my vault
for some McMaster car parts.
So I know I start with mmc,
I'm going to go up here to the top.
You see the green little arrow for start search,
and it's going to start searching.
You can see automatically it's filled in.
A bunch of McMaster car parts.
It tells me where they're checked out,
who they're checked out by,
modified, location,
basically all the information you could ever need.
And then below
in our preview window, we get the
eDrawings preview of the part as well.
All right, so let's jump out of that for a second.
We're going to clear our search.
Go back to the main vault view.
So these are our PDM tabs down here below,
so let's take a minute to look at these.
So like we just saw, if we go and look at a part file,
we can get a preview down here
and manipulate it with eDrawings
using all the tools in eDrawings.
We have the data card.
This holds all of the metadata in the background
related to your custom properties.
So you can go in here and do something like
update the description.
So I've got this part checked out,
which gives me the ability to do that,
and I'm going to put in Button For
Access.
And I just go up to the right over here,
click save, and that change is saved for that part.
So you can do a lot of work right here,
and you can customize this whole interface for your company.
Next slot over, we see the versions.
So you get the latest version,
because all of these are new files that I've just added,
they're all -1,
that means they're not actually checked in all the way yet,
so when I do check them in they'll move to version 1 then 2.
We've got our bill of materials.
So if you look in an assembly,
like this claw for example,
ope, it hasn't been checked in actually,
so it's not showing my bill of materials.
Let's go ahead and check in all of these parts.
We're going to right click,
go down to check in.
I'm going to add a comment,
click check in.
And now that it's been entered into the vault
we can see the bill of materials.
So a lot of tools here with the BOM,
but the big highlights are that you can save it out
as a CSV, so if you're working with Excel
and trying to do big BOMs and do some filtering,
maybe looking at some cost down operations,
things like that, you can export that material right out.
You can also use it in various drawings.
Also when you go to contains,
you can see if an assembly contains certain parts
and what it contains and where it contains,
and you can also do the reverse.
So if I pick this item down here I can see where it's used,
and it's used in that assembly.
So this is the basics of the Windows explorer.
It's got a lot of information in it,
a lot of tools, but you always want to make sure
that you're working online
and checking in and checking out your files as you go.