Maybe a full-blown PDM system such as Teamcenter, Solid Edge for SharePoint, or even Insight, isn’t feasible at your company right now.  That, however, does not mean that your data has to be a mess! Windows Explorer is great for some things, like opening your latest family pictures in Paint to do some Editing, but you do not EVER want to start moving, copying, or renaming any Solid Edge documents freely in Windows Explorer.  Often times, an assembly’s parts are all over the place in your filesystem, whether local or on a server.  To correctly group all related files into a single folder, see the easy steps outlined below to correctly manage Solid Edge files using Revision Manager.

First: how do you open Revision Manager?  You can do this both from inside of your Solid Edge assembly or draft document, or in Windows Explorer.  In Solid Edge, it is the button called View and Markup, which requires one more click.

In Windows Explorer, you have the option for Revision Manager right away.

If you open the assembly or draft into View and Markup as shown below, just hit the “Revision Manager” button in the “Open In” section in the top-left.

Now, you will see the list of all related files in the window. Be sure to expand any sub-assemblies in the list, either manually clicking the + signs, or using the “Expand All” button in the Ribbon Bar.  Here you can use various tools in the Ribbon Bar to do things such as Rename a document, replace a document, or even add a revision by incrementing the name.

Next, hit the “Select All” button.

Set the action to “Copy”

Notice all of the files’ “Action” column was updated to “Copy”. Now choose “Set Path”.

Here, you can select the folder you want to copy all of the files to, or create a new one.

Next, select the “Perform Actions” button to execute the copying.

Now you can open that single folder and see all of the files related to that assembly or draft file in one place.

Lastly, you can right-click on this folder, go to the “Send To” menu, and choose “Compressed (zipped) folder” to create a .zip file, for easier sending or uploading, for example.

When you start getting into vaulting, checking files in and out, Engineering Change Requests and Orders, and Workflows, for example, we’ll have to get into a PDM system such as Insight, Solid Edge for SharePoint, or Teamcenter.  Hopefully you have been using Revision Manager for these actions, but if not, you definitely want to start right away!