Hi folks. I’m a relatively new EPDM user. I have referred to this forum regularly over the past few months and appreciate the dialogue; I have learned much. The primary thing I have learned is that I have SO MUCH MORE to learn. This is my first question to the community.

Having been a CM manager for 25+ years I understand the rationale for EPDM Revision functionality. However, we have a situation that requires this functionality to be tailored. One of our vaults is a multi-organization "project vault” wherein we are not doing formal CM, yet need to capture the latest Rev of files on the data card - if there is a Rev….many of these files are just reference documents that do not contain a revision level. Whenever the files are changed, we take the latest version from the responsible organization and put it through a simple workflow to “Lock” the file into the vault rather than to “Approve” it, since formal CM is already performed at the responsible organization (other company).

Since there are at least dozen organizations participating in his project, each with their own file naming and revision schemes, we need to be able to set the Rev level manually – or leave blank. One thought was to make a free text field called Rev, but that would not show up in the History dropdown.

Our VAR has suggested making multiple rules in the workflow steps to account for the multiple organization's files. This is simply not an option due to the lack of control we have over the other organization’s files and processes, and the fact that we will add organizations as we go. We would need a full time admin just to handle the multiple Rev rules.

What we need: A way to manually input/update the Rev in the data card before kickoff of workflow, and to let that Rev be locked in at completion of the workflow. The only Rev controls that would be necessary in this vault would be a warning if the Rev for this file already existed in the vault. We would also want to indicate “No Revision” files so that these files did not get the Rev warning.

(Some of the project organizations add subsequent Rev in there file names, which creates another set of issues which I will likely address in another post.)

Due to the numerous multi-organizational projects around the world, I assume someone has run into a similar Rev conundrum in EPDM already. If so, I’m all ears!