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In the last blog post we referenced a couple of inportant changes to site replication behaviors to address performance and user workflows.
The first improvement, site affinity, is designed to improve the communication speed and reliability, supported by improved server to server communication, the second change to replication is user focussed and relates to file ownership.
In a connected workgroup environment (replicating database and filestore to each site) only one site can own a file at any time. Users on other sites wanting to edit a file need to lease it – the lease period can be set to a perod from 0 upwards and means that during that specified time (or whilever the file is checked out) no other user can request ownership.
All things being equal, that is, the file is checked in and noone has an existing lease on it, a user can request site ownership and go on to edit the file. In the past though this meant working through a series of dialogs where the user would need to ensure he had site wonership of all files he was intending to mofiy before opening anything or try his luck – open the file, attempt check out, perhaps fail (no site ownership), go to Vault explorer and request ownership, wait, go back to Inventor and check out.
Vault 2013 now permits users to simply check out the file and we do the rest: Check which site owns the file, make sure the file is eligible for change of ownership, transfer ownership and check out without any further interaction.
To help facilitate this the default lease period is set to 0, meaning that as soon as a file is checked back in it is available for ownership transfer – you can still change this default setting if you wish to retain ownership in your office but the 0 lease period makes it simpler to move files around.
You dhoulf note that if a file is checked out or its site is offline you will still be denied access to modify the file – but that's how its supposed to work.
More information on file ownership and replication can be found here if you need to brush up on what this all means for end users:
