PDF Publish Location By Life Cycle

[richard_scott]

The addition of the automatic PDF publisher to Vault has been great however the fact that there is no way control the publishing location  other than the globally defined setting is a little frustrating. Our system is currently setup such that PDFs are automatically published to a "$/Released" folder (within Vault) which is fine for the vast majority of drawings. The issue comes when there are certain items that should not be accessible to all users. Whilst the state based security for a lifecycle can control access to the original DWGs etc. the default publish location negates most of this security by putting the final PDF in the general folder. One way of dealing with this would be the option of changing the publish location/folder for certain lifecycles to say "$/ReleasedSecure" that can then have the initial permission set defined at the folder level. Ideally this location would be definable within the state transition actions.

The current work around for this is to disable the automatic publishing for certain lifecycles and rely on a manual action to generate the PDF. This file then has to be manually loaded into Vault which overall is not a very robust method of drawing control.

[ihayesjr]

@richard_scott 

Who are the users that need access to non-released PDFs and released PDFs outside of Vault?

Why publish PDF files for non-released versions of the drawings?

[richard_scott]

My apologies, my description may not have been the best. Our particular situation is that manufacturing community work from the PDFs that are published when the DWG goes into the released state and these are published directly into a general released folder within vault. Manufacturing only have access to this released folder and not the original DWGs through thin client. Certain projects we have are of a restricted nature and as such we need to be able to control access to both the original files (i.e. which members of the engineering community can access them) and the released PDFs (which members of manufacturing can access them). The proposed method for dealing with this situation would be to move the DWGs/IPTs/etc into a separate folder to control engineering access and be able define the vault folder that the PDFs get published to once they have been through the approval loop. This folder can then have the appropriate permissions applied to it.

Hopefully this is a little clearer.

[ihayesjr]

@richard_scott 

If I understand your workflow correctly, your drawings should go into an Approval state, which doesn't create a PDF, before the Released state. Then once the drawing is approved, a user can change the state to Released, which will create a PDF and place it in the single folder for the manufacturing users to get to it. No need to move files around.

[richard_scott]

@ihayesjr yes you are correct this is how our standard project workflow goes. What we would like to be able to do is redirect the PDF publishing for certain parts to a separate (more secure) area.