The mystery of Al Capone's Enterprise Vault

Today Geraldo Rivera and I will explore the mysterious SOLIDWORKS Enteprise Vault owned by Al Capone. I wanted this to be a short little blog entry of how Al Capone used the Item Master inside of Enterprise, but Geraldo wants to make this a five part mini-series to air on ABC during sweeps week.

Item Centric PDM ability was introduced in Enterprise 2009 service pack two. Since that time there has been nothing but mystery around it. “What good is it?” People have been asking. Now, here in Capone’s server room we can see just how the Item Master could be used in industry!

The best way to think of what an item is is to imagine a datacard with no corresponding file. This item can [optionally] be linked to a file and thus be used to further describe properties of the file. What is nice is that an item can be checked in and out of the vault independently of the file, allowing you to update information about the file without changing its revision.

Geraldo has the cameras grouped around him, it appears he has found Capone’s item card. It looks just like a datacard. This one has several tabs across the top, one of them is marked “Vendor Information”

Geraldo explains: “As you can see here Al Capone was able to track his vendor information with this customizable item card right within Enterprise, now he could store pricing information in Enterprise and not have to change the revision of a part if the vendor’s price changed. Hey, is that Michelle Malkin in that picture?”

Take it easy there Geraldo, that is not a picture of Michelle. Let’s see what other tabs Capone has on his item card…