It's my first time administrating perforce and I'm having some challenges understanding the configurations for handling modified files in the workspace view.
We have a small team and work in separate file structures. It would be most helpful to set the workspace to read and write, allow team members to open and edit each file without checking them out. Modified files would show up as modified in the workspace view and could be submitted.
I see the benefit of working with a read only/checkout structure but for the current team size and disciplines it's clunky.
Anyway to configure the workspace to function without checkouts?
"Checking out" a file just means marking it that you are editing it and adding it to your pending changelist so you can submit it. Checking out does not lock the file for other users by defaul, that only happens if they are marked for exclusive checkout.
For binary assets it is recommended that you set up a feature called "exclusive checkout," which makes it so only one person can have that file checked out at a time. Usually that is done via the typemap, by adding the +l (lowercase L) modifier to binary asset types.
If you don't want that feature, just don't add the +l to files in your typemap. For files that have already been added to your depot, you will need to change their file type to remove the +l exclusive checkout modifier. You can do that in P4V by selecting the files, right clicking, and choosing change file type. Then uncheck the +l and submit those files. Then you can have multiple people check out the files at once.
Just be careful, since changes to binary files can't be merged and if multiple people check out and make changes to the same file, after one person submits their changes, the other person will not be able to submit theirs until they get the other person's changes and then redo their own. (Which is why I usually recommend people use exclusive checkout if at all possible).
Hope that helps!