Best practices with sharing/structuring documents?

S1mon

I have a personal Standard account (call it account A) and a trial Pro account (with some other engineers at my company, call it account . I'm experimenting with how sharing works since I haven't had that much opportunity to do it until now, and I have questions....

1. There's a document owned by 'A', shared with 'B'. Why can't someone at company 'B' organize that document into a folder created at company 'B'?
2. When a document is shared from 'A' to 'B', 'B' can only see the things which are created in that document. If there's an assembly which references other documents that 'A' owns, 'B' can't see them unless they're shared too. In general this seems like a good idea, but what if I want to share a document and all the other documents that are referenced by that document? How do I do that?
3. What project document structures have worked and not worked well for you in the past? I'm tempted now to put most of a project in a single document, except for OTS parts or subassemblies which are shared by multiple projects/products. How is this all affected by sharing with vendors, contractors, etc?

NeilCooke

1. Because the doc is owned by A and putting it into a folder owned by B would/could try to change the doc’s permissions. This would be true even if A was a Pro account although it would be considerably easier to manage. 

2. Put all the docs in a folder and share the folder. 

3. Don’t put everything in one doc for performance reasons. Also, when sharing, a vendor would see everything in that doc. 

NeilCooke

1. Because the doc is owned by A and putting it into a folder owned by B would/could try to change the doc’s permissions. This would be true even if A was a Pro account although it would be considerably easier to manage. 

2. Put all the docs in a folder and share the folder. 

3. Don’t put everything in one doc for performance reasons. Also, when sharing, a vendor would see everything in that doc. 

chadstoltzfus

I would echo what Neil said. In my experience, it is much easier to bring elements together than it is to split them apart. 

S1mon

@NeilCooke

1. Because the doc is owned by A and putting it into a folder owned by B would/could try to change the doc’s permissions. This would be true even if A was a Pro account although it would be considerably easier to manage. 

I don't really understand why this should be the case. I get that it may be how things are implemented, but as a user it seems weird that I can't put a bunch of things shared with me into a folder. Even if those folders are "special" to the shared-with-me section, and can't contain other stuff, it's awkward not to be able to organize stuff.

2. Put all the docs in a folder and share the folder. 

I don't know if this is a bug or a "feature" but this is currently not possible for subfolders - only top level folders. I actually thought it wasn't even possible to share folders because I never tried to share top level folders. To me this is a bug.

3. Don’t put everything in one doc for performance reasons. Also, when sharing, a vendor would see everything in that doc. 

During earlier stages of development, it can be a big pain to have to constantly request the latest versions of things coming from other documents. I love that this is a pull-request when development is further along - it prevents surprises, and allows much better revision control than say Solidworks. However, I would love to have the option to turn on automatic updates for a document.