[otherguy]

I also suggest checking out grabcad.

If you've settled on PDM for a reason, go for it, but its not going to be as hands off as grab cad.

Before last season we evaluated a number of different options for the CAD team to use. We looked at github, grab cad, Dropbox, and solidworks pdm. Grabcad is by far the easiest for the CAD students and mentors to use. After the initial setup, I don't think we required any intervention to teach people how to use it "correctly" or to fix problems with the wrong versions of files being committed or not being committed. There's no server machine that you have to worry about hosting/maintaining. A big concern for us was in getting a windows machine w/ PDM online and running reliably 24/7 w/ enough bandwidth that we wouldn't affect our workflows.

Grabcad also has some pretty great features for graphically reviewing the differences between models over time. This allows mentors to quickly review changes that students have made for the work they were assigned. There's also mobile apps and web based viewers for the models in your projects, so you can quickly take measurements on parts when you're not at a machine with solid works installed. It also supports commenting and annotating parts, so members of the team that don't know CAD can review parts and voice their oppinions/suggestions right against the models. And their desktop applications integrate nicely with solidworks.

If it wasnt obvious, we love grabcad. We were getting ready to pay for it before they announced it would be free to FIRST teams. Then this past year they announced it would be free to everyone, forever, so that sealed the deal. Its definitely worth looking into.