You can publish documents and associated data for several reasons:
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Exchange and enhance data among tools, to avoid creating data multiple times in multiple authoring tools.
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Report on common data originating in multiple tools.
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Provide enterprise-wide accessibility to published documents.
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Manage change, including workflow history and document revision management.
You can also publish documents to share information with users in other tools without going through a formal workflow. To share data, you can publish a document to a "for sharing" workflow that has only a load step, so that the data is made available to other authoring tools as soon as you publish the document.
You can also publish a document by not assigning the document to a workflow, but rather by using the default workflow from SmartPlant Foundation. When you do not select a workflow for a document during publishing, the SmartPlant Loader loads the document as soon as it reaches the top of the Loader queue.