To Serial Number or Not To Serial Number: That is the question

Given the types of documents we in engineering deal with.  Be it SolidWorks documents or Inventor  or AutoCad.  Or MS Office or MathCAD.  What is your experience with Serial Numbers?  I was planning on using initial Development Numbers (Sandbox Numbers) that get switched out to Production Numbers but the complication with that is I wanted to uses the Designers initials as part of the Development Number.  No biggie except the Sandbox is shared between all users on any given project so I would need to write a Serial Number Addin to determine whom the users is requesting it.  Obviously a big issue with the Development Numbers is that to rename I would need to Move them from a Development folder to a Production folder and have the accociated data Cards set up calling different Serial Number Generators.

Then comes the issue with Items versus Files.  I can obviously generate Production Item Numbers easy enough but the Files should match.

How are you doing this sort of this?

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