I've been working at my first Solidworks-based job for 3 weeks and I'm finding EPDM to be rather challenging to learn and use effectively. This is especially true as the "low man on the totem pole". My department has their system setup the way they feel is best, so my suggestions are quickly met with scrutiny and disaster scenarios.

For example, I've noticed that projects become bottlenecked because only one person is allowed to work on a project at the same time within EPDM. Of course there is the option of saving files locally as a workaround but that kind of defeats the purpose of having EPDM. In general I realize that it is probably best to not have parts, assemblies and drawings of the same project being edited by multiple users at the same time for obvious file referencing reasons, but when there's a time crunch and projects need to get done, I think it would be very useful to allow multiple users to be working on different phases of the project. This is especially true of the drawing, which can be rather time consuming for large assemblies. Why not allow one person to build the geometry, and then at an appropriate time allow another person to begin the drawing while some aspects of the 3D model are still in progress?

Has anyone had experience with this kind of concurrent production? Does anyone have any ideas on how to successfully impliment this type of workflow using EPDM, such as settings that can allow write access to referenced files? Or is this a really bad idea? Please tell me. I'd like to know, either good or bad. Thank you.