Re: file management - best practice
Scott,
Are you suggesting that a single user project should still activate worksets, for purposes of redundancy and archival? I guess I had not thought of the central file being a "kind of back-up".
Are there any pitfalls to practice, if a single user project is fairly typical (one half of all projects)?
Re: file management - best practice
Personally, Yes. The only potential downside is a couple of seconds slower Save to Central (Syncronize with Central in 2010), and of course, the time it may take awhile to convert it the first time. This does provide for some additional methods of getting graphics to appear correct a little easier that embedding paramaters into items, since a View Filter can use a workset as an item to filter on.
Re: file management - best practice
In my experience, it is MUCH faster to work on a local file on your own machine and then STC back to the central file on the server. Otherwise, you're working on a file stored on the server, and save times are MUCH longer. When you STC you're only saving changes back to the central file. If you're just working on a file on the server, then the entire file has to be saved back across the network.
Most of our workshared project files take less than 30 seconds to STC, but a non-workshared file of comparable size, even one less than 20MB, can take over 2 minutes to save. And that's across a gigabit office network to a sever just on the other side of the wall from my PC.
So besides file redundancy, work speed and of course view control are some of the other benefits of worksharing a file, even if only one person works on it.