[pmax]

Hi Ian,
As for data management choices, I'd recommend giving Vault a try. To my knowledge it does not demand an intranet; many Autodesk customers use it in distributed environments.

Something to look forward to in R2008 is a much improved Refresh command. Imagine three team members make changes to three components, all in the main assembly. Each person submits their changes to the repository, and grabs the updated versions of all three parts.

In the past, the Refresh command would close your current assembly, and reopen it, resulting in a very time-intensive process just to get other people's changes into session. In R2008, only the files that need refreshing are reloaded; everything else stays loaded.

Good luck to the teams this year,
Pete