I am trying to understand the best practices for sharing product data within WC with companies/partners/suppliers/co-developers outside our company. At present, the only method I can find is to 'pack' the some or all of product data (meta data, assembly & parts, drawings, and all other relevant data) and send it to the recipient. And when there is an update to the data that has been shared, then do this all over again.
On the recipient's side, they have to 'unpack' the data and load it into their system. We have a few scenarios here:
1. The recipient has WC+Creo - they may be able to take the data 'as is' with very little massaging to get into their system.
2. The recipient has PDM/PLM/CAD from another vendor - they have to find a way to "import" the data into their system, and this may lead to data being neither imported into their PLM system or their CAD system.
3. The recipient has only CAD system - they have to grab the CAD data out of the 'pack' and use it, perhaps after translating it into their native CAD system, if they arent using Creo.
And all of them have to this over again the moment something changes at the sending end to either the metadata or the CAD data.
I would like to know if the user community has evolved a set of best practices for each scenario. I would appreciate if people can share their thoughts on how they would deal with this situation in their company.