Insanely Configurable Autodesk PLM 360 – Part 3

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Workspace creation happens in PLM 360 Setup. In fact, let’s take a look at Setup a little closer. It has three tabs. The first tab is dedicated to configuring Workspaces, which we will get to in a while.

The second tab is called “General” and has various system settings including the Main Menu Designer and a Logo Manager. If you noticed in the image above. I replaced the “Autodesk PLM 360” logo with my own “Deelip.com” logo. I can also change logo which shows on the log in page. And that’s about it. The UI is not insanely configurable and I’m sure that it needs to be either.

 

New Workspace

Clicking the New Workspace button takes you to a form where you select a Workspace Type. There are six types of workspaces in PLM 360 as can be seen in the image below. I chose Basic Workspace with workflow.

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Next we need to create the fields for the workspace item. Here is an image showing the field creation for a single line text field for the title of the blog post.

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Fields can be of a different types – single line, paragraph, numbers, dates, check boxes, radio buttons and even images. You can set validations for each field. For example, you can make a field compulsory or optional, force the user to enter it in a particular format, etc. For example, the image below shows the validations for an email field that is compulsory.

As you can see from the link in the image above fields can also be computed. This means that their values can be cooked up from the values of other fields, pretty much like any spreadsheet program.

 

Workspace Item Layout

After creating the fields we now need to design a form for data entry. For that we add something known as a Section to the workspace. A section is basically a piece of screen real estate which will house the web page controls for each field. Apart from serving the purpose of organizing the form into logical areas, sections also serve as method of restricting the visibility of data to certain user of the system. The following image shows a section titled Confidential with view only access to users of the Blog group and edit access to Administrators.

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After adding sections, we drag and drop the fields into them and arrange them in the order we want them to be in the data entry form.

In the next part of this series we will configure PLM 360 to show the Blog workspace in the Main Menu and add a blog post using the data entry form we just set up.

Part 4 >>