Understanding collaboration in work areas

The GCF supports collaborating in Meridian Enterprise work areas. Collaborating in work areas is nearly transparent:

• You do not need to specify the destination work area when enlisting a site, transferring ownership, or claiming ownership. The GCF detects the work area of the selected document and will store the copies of the document in the corresponding work areas at the collaborating sites.
• The work area name will appear with the site name (for example, Detroit\Project Work Area) on the Collaboration Status property page.

However, there are a few limitations:

• The work area structure must be identical at all collaborating sites. If an attempt is made to share a document that resides in a work area at the owning site with a site where the work area does not yet exist, the GCF will not create the work area and sharing the document will fail. You must manually synchronize the work area structure among all collaborating vaults. For this reason, using many work areas for short-term projects or sub-work areas may not be practical with the GCF.
• If you assign a document from the Main area to a work area in the local vault, it will be automatically assigned to the corresponding work area in the collaborating vaults. The same is true when you release the document from the work area in the local vault; it will be released from the corresponding work area in the collaborating vaults.
• If a document that is assigned to a work area has Meridian Enterprise references to other documents (for example, parts of an assembly or sub-assembly) that do not reside in the work area in the local vault, the copies of the assigned document and all referenced documents will be assigned to the corresponding work area in the collaborating vaults. The same is true when you release the document from the work area in the local vault; the copies will all be released from the corresponding work area in the collaborating vaults.
• When a remote vault is enlisted for a document that has Meridian Enterprise references and resides in a work area, the document and its references that reside in the Main area will all be assigned to the corresponding work area in the remote vault.