[ORD/Connect] Worksets? I'd like to talk with someone about how these will work with my company setup.

I'm starting to dig into Connect (ORD) and I'm trying to wrap my head around how this will work in the least disruptive way.

Currently, we have all of our standards (configurations, DGNLIBs, cell, resources) on the M: drive. There's a Bentley directory, and then each client has a directory under that. My PCFs contain the variables necessary to load the standards for that client. Since each client has any number of design projects, that made more sense than trying to create a PCF for every project we're going to work on - the list would have been hundreds of projects long if there were a PCF for each project.

Project design files are stored on a different network drive (S:). Everybody knows where they are, and all of the departments have equal access to any project they are a part of. Most people working on a project know which client that job is for, so when they open Microstation, they select their Project (PCF) User (them) and they navigate to the S: drive and open their files.

It's not super technical, but it's been effective enough. Any project manager can create a design project, and there's nothing really technical to it because the CAD just kind of floats on top. It's not an integral part of project creation.

That has me thinking about the new Connect workspaces and worksets - I'm not entirely sure how that would shake out over our network.

The way I understand it right now (and feel free to enlighten me!) is that, for our purposes, workspaces could be essentially what our client PCFs are now. Those would go onto our M: drive, similar to now.

But what about worksets? Those would seem to be the actual design project directories on the S: drive...and that sounds like a lot of overhead to keep managed. That sounds as if the person who creates the project directory would also need to know how to generate a workset to go along with it. Or they would need to remember that a workset needed to be requested to go along with the directory before anyone starts working. Both of which are a bit much to expect our project managers to remember...And the list of worksets would be dozens and dozens long. Can I even store my worksets in a place separate from the workspace?

Is it possible to have more than one workspace, but then just one "generic" workset? I can see the benefit of having a workset for each project, but I'm concerned that creating them all might be too restrictive or complicated for "anyone" in the company to do. How essential is it to have only data for a specific project locked into a workset? Can a workset span multiple projects?

I understand that there will have to be some rethinking about how best to manage data with the new Connect-type configurations, but I want to disrupt the company process as little as possible. I can appreciate that I could be missing out on some neat features by sticking as closely as possible to the established way we have here, but I really don't want to turn everybody upside down, or tell them that Transportation has to have something special.

Does anyone have suggestions, experiences, things NOT to do?

Thank you.
MaryB