Multiple users to access the same Vault over the network

[DarrenYoung]

So, if I buy vanilla Acad, put it on subscription, I can dl vault from the subscription web site. but, since I bought Map and put it under subscription, I'm SOL with Vault?

That makes a lot of sense......

That's actually a good thing. Vault leavs a lot to be desired with it's integration into non-mechanical products.

Vault was originally developed by a company based in Minnesota specifically for managing Inventor data. Autodesk then bought it and expended it to all it's mechanical products. I was so well received that Autodesk is working it (although slowly) into it's other product lines.

C3D is the first non-mechanical vertical to offer support for Vault although I believe that Vault development is still handled (for now) under the Mechanical division of Autodesk.

Vault and AutoCAD's Shet Set Manager, for example, are not compatable or integrated. Until Autodesk oficially supports Vault for your particular flavor of CAD, I'd personally stay away from it.

Vault is esentially a "work in process" data management tool. And being originally designed for Inventor and mechanical work flows, without additional work and functionality, it's not well suited for workflows of other disciplines at this time with the exception of C3D.

[cadtag]

Hi Darren

Yea, I understand that Vault is a long ways from being fully integrated -my personal wish for '08 is that Adesk puts more effort into integrating their existing features into a more cohesive whole instead of adding more).

But the fact that Vault is a work in progress is all the more reason to start playing with it and getting familiar with it now, before it's too late. Since c3d is the defined future path for, I'm going to have to be there in my day job, and I'd like to be able to answer the questions that are going to come up. I'm not at all sure I like the idea of using Vault to handle c3d objects, as that doesn't seem like an appropriate use of the technology. But, until I can do some hands-on all I can do is guess without any real basis to back those guesses up.

cheers

[DarrenYoung]

The Civil3d.com blog has had some good Vault posts in the past. All indications that I've heard is that Vault isn't too bad in that environment.

I don't use Vault myself. Would like too but there's still issues with it. Because of the volume of data we produce (we fabricate over 1.5 million pieces of custom cut-stone per year) that's a lot of data. And if Vault was configured to just keep one revision of each drawing, that's a huge amount if disk space increase so there's the financial aspect of getting that diskspace not to mention the SQL CALs costs.

Also, Vault deals with work in process...that's what it's designed to do. We don't have a huge need for that. 99% of our work is finalized (by architects, general contractors, etc) THEN it get's drawn at the piece part level which typically does'nt have a further revision. That means, the traditional Return On Investment calculators Autodesk uses don't apply to us. They even agree with that assesment. Product Stream is really where we'd benefit but of course, Vault would need to be the foundation.

Vault doesn't replicate to multiple locations. There's a beta of a tool that allows a read-only replicated copy, but that doesn't do us much good. Because Vault can check out just the parts of an assembly one wants and not the whole assembly, Autodesk thinks the transfer time over the netwrok to a remote location is "improved". For the most part, they're right. However, again, we don't have that work flow. We'll start with nothing or a few files and turn them into thousands. Transfering even a couple hundred files over the net is too ineficient for us.

Then there's the whole Sheet Set Manager integration (or lack there of). When I had a copule people from the data management group of our location reseller here on site along with a couple of Vault's product managers from Autodesk, they didn't even know what Sheet Set Manager was. We haven't used Sheet Set Manager either bevcause we'd like to use vault. We haven't used Vault beause we'd like to use Sheet Set Manager so as you can see, we're of the fence.

Vault's only real benefit here would be controling our data sets (for future automnation, integration and reporting with Product Stream) as well as the automatic DWF file generation.

But like you said, I like to keep an eye on it because I'm whole heartedly convinced, that migrating Vault into our environment will be a nesesity at some point.