I took on the task of standardizing my companies entire catalog of manufactured parts; I work for a utility truck company and we have lot's of parts. I successfully did that and have stored the entire volume on an external hard drive that only I have access to. Unfortunately I have not been able to talk the boss into purchasing me a PDM suite so I can do this right, now I have to be clever.

One of the immediate pitfalls I have encountered is that there are five of us engineers, all doing body parts and assemblies on a variety of jobs. For most of our assemblies we use parts from standard stock bodies and modify as needed from there. Which requires us to open the parts from a central location (the old parts are stored on a network drive accessible to all of us) and save them as different name onto our individual computers before we can modify them. If not the standard parts are no longer correct. I'm sure this is familiar but I am being specific so I can process what I'm trying to ask.

My project of standardizing parts into a nine-digit numerical code is complete, with exception to new parts or bodies we may add in the future. The catalog of new parts is still on my hard drive and I want some sort of protection plan in place before I release them.

The get to the point here, is there a way, without PDM software, that I can read/write protect the files on my hard drive and have them editable by other users so long as they save the part names to the corresponding job? And have it set in a way that it will not allow them to edit until AFTER they save the parts out?

Anything you have might help, and know it's appreciated.

Justin Beuke