The Windchill PDM system provides you with a private area for managing your work while working with other designers. This area is called the Workspace. The Workspace allows you to track and change multiple objects and perform basic data management operations from within the Creouser interface. The Workspace enables designers to operate independently while recording and tracking concurrent activities to assist in product design decisions.

The Workspace is primarily used to view and modify objects in the user’s local cache. As a PDM user, you typically check-out or download design information from the Windchill PDM server to your workspace to modify or view it. When you are finished modifying a design and you want to share the modification with other users, you must perform a check-in operation.

It is through the Workspace that the Windchill PDM server connects to a Creo application. The Creo session and the workspace are linked such that information that is modified in one application can be seen in another Creo application.

The Windchill PDM system can create multiple workspaces. This is useful if you are working on several projects at one time because it allows you to create a workspace for each of your projects and segregate your design data by project affiliation. 

Download—Transfers the contents of an object from the Windchill PDM server to your local file system. The downloaded object is read-only, intended only to be used as a reference object. To modify a downloaded object, you must perform a checkout operation.

Check Out—Communicates your intention to modify a design to the server. While the design is checked-out the Windchill PDM server locks the object, so only the user who checked out the design can modify it. All other users can only download a read-only copy of the design.

Upload—Transfers a new file from your current Creo session to your personal area on the Windchill PDM server. Uploaded files are securely stored on the PDM server, however, an uploaded object will not be visible to other PDM users or subject to change control management until you perform the checkin.

Check In—Publishes a modified object from your private Workspace to the Windchill PDM server. The check-in process stores your modified object as a new iteration on the PDM server and unlocks it so that other PDM users are free to check out and modify that object.

Undo Checkout—Deletes a checked-out status on the Windchill PDM server and unlocks the object so that other PDM users can check out and modify that object. If you cancel the checkout of an object that you have modified or if the object is in session, the cancelled checkout reverses all changes made to the object since it was last checked in.

Revise and Check Out —Revises and checks out objects as a single task and allows the retrieval of parts and assemblies from a Windchill 9.1 server without checking them out.

Revise—Creates a new product revision for a selected item regardless of whether the object is checked-out or not. The new revision represents a major event in a product's life cycle.

Update—Downloads the latest iteration of an object from the Windchill PDM server.

The dm_ws_implicit_refresh configuration option is set to yes by default. The Workspace is, therefore, automatically refreshed when you perform actions that change the state of the objects in the Workspace.

You can set preferences to record as frames Workspace operations that change the state of the cache. You can access these frames in the Creo browser to restore the frames and revert to an action, object and design iteration, or the state of the Workspace and the cache at any given time. For details, refer to the Windchill guide, Using Creo Parametric with Windchill, and the Windchill Help Center module, Workspace Help.