When you are working with attribute tables for feature classes, it should be possible to export a selection of the attributes to excel and mark the exported records as checked out. The records that are checked out should not be editable in ArcGIS, or the user should receive a warning that the records are checked out. It is important that this read-only status of the data is set on record level, not on feature class level, so that users can still work on other records! After editing the values outside ArcGIS you should be able to reimport the data to update the attribute table and check the records in again.
Explanation: We store attribute data for high voltage towers. When there's a maintenance campaign, a contractor receives an export of the attribute data in excel, does the maintenance/survey/repair etc., updates the data and then it has to be synchronized again with the towers in the geodatabase. To do this manually is unjustifiable effort. Also there's the risk, that someone in the business is changing data, which will be overwritten later when data is synchronized again.
I didn't find any tool that covers this requirement. Is there anything in development? Maybe there's a workaround or a 3rd party tool? If not, I'd be very happy to hear that this is being examined and dealt with.
