Hi, we have recently switched from PDM Workgroup to PDM Enterprise (v. 2010).

So far, everything is running quite good -- there are a few issues, but nothing dramatic.

We have 13 engineers in our main office (Belgium) and 1 in Germany.

This 1 person never had access to the PDM Workgroup Vault, he had his own standalone version of SolidWorks. When needed he was sent a bunch of files via FTP, and when needed we received a few from him back.

Since we now have Enterprise we can avoid the (logical) issues of version (mis)management that the above situation caused.

We would like to connect our German colleague to our Enterprise PDM system, so we are investigating if Replicated Archives is the way to go - or not.

A few questions I have:

1. What bandwidth do we need?

2. How do we need to setup our VPN?

In detail:

1. In Belgium we a broadband connection with 65Mbit Download and 4.7Mbit Upload.

The German connection is 1.3Mbit Down and 189kbit Up. It is currently not possible to upgrade the connection

If I take into account the amount of data that we produce (average 1.5GB per day), even with this slow connection, it would be possible to send our data to Germany overnight (scheduled).

I am more worried about the user experience when our Geman colleague is just working/browsing/reading file properties/reading&updating data cards.

Would his connection be sufficient or will this be unworkable for him?

2. My initital thought was that a dialup-VPN on the German Archive Server would be sufficient for working and replication. Belgian users have the Belgian Archive Server and the Database on the LAN, the German user sees his own archive and the Database via the VPN. So, working should be no problem (unless of course speed is an issue)

But for replication this is not OK? When using dial-up VPN the dialer PC can see the WAN, but the PCs on the WAN cannot see the dialer-PC, correct? So, the German server would be able to communicate with the entire Belgian network, but none of the Belgian servers would be able to initiate communication to the German server?

If I make a correction interpretation of the Replication Guide, then I need 2 connections in Replication Settings: 1 from G to B and 1 from B to G.

Am I correct in assuming that a connection is a one-way process: i.e. Target server pulls files from Source server, put doesn't push his own files to Source?

If that's the case, dialup-VPN from G to B would only do have of the job (if anything at all) and the Belgian server would never get updated with the German files?

Do I need a site-to-site VPN to have this working, or am I misreading something?