Today I intercepted two “final” assemblies uploaded 6 minutes apart — one named Gearbox_FINAL_v12 and its evil twin Gearbox_Final_v12b — so our PDM indexed them into different projects and search returned both. I’m tightening the naming schema and cross-project duplicate checks to keep integrity intact and access predictable; what’s the most ridiculous filename or version that’s sabotaged discoverability on your end?
Had to ban the word “final” outright — our PDM pre-check rejects it and auto-renames to PartNumber_Rev from properties, so your two 6‑minute twins would’ve landed in one project. If folks balk, we let them keep a human-friendly title in metadata and use semver for versions instead: https://semver.org.
Quick example, @OP: we added a pre-save hook that writes a hidden GUID into a custom property and had PDM use that as the canonical ID, so “FINAL_v12” and “Final_v12b” uploaded 6 minutes apart collapse to one record and index under the same project. Small caveat: cross-site copies need a property sync job or they’ll silently fork again.
We took @s_brooks58’s idea further and fingerprinted the part: a post-save job exports a temp STEP, hashes it, and writes the hash to a property, so FINAL_v12 and Final_v12b collide and PDM flags the dup across projects. Small caveat: we only hash on release to keep saves snappy.
Did the opposite of renaming: we put a 10-minute time-out on new assemblies — if one lands and matches PartNumber + Description of an existing, PDM dumps it in a quarantine queue for merge, which would’ve caught your “6 minutes” twins, @OP. Works great for cross-project dupes without messing names; only downside is it slows urgent fixes, so leads can bypass with a one-click override.
@sarah_l98 we went low-tech: a check-in linter blocks ‘final’/‘copy’ and auto-renames to PartNumber_Rev from properties, then locks Rev on release. Dupes fell off a cliff — vendor drops need a bypass — and the ‘FINAL’ swear jar now funds Friday donuts.