AutoDesk Vault Opinions

[Bill Tillman]

A few months ago we had AutoDesk's people come in and they gave a very impressive demo of their new "Vault" software. We're starting to give this a really hard look and since the investment will be substantial I was hoping to hear from anyone else who may be using this platform. What are other user's opinions and experiences with this. Any advice and comments would be appreciated.

[spiderdian]

we had problems at first, because we don't understand the concept. you should pay attention on the icons because it says a lot about the file. be careful when checking in files that are being worked on by other users, their work will be scrapped!

[Bill Tillman]

You know that's a problem I'm finding right now in another platform. We're doing lots of dev work with Visual Studio and we use Tortoise as our version control. And no matter what they say about these kinds of products, if Developer #1 is working on a file and then Developer #2 works on the same file, it's a timing issue and indeed almost a race to who get's their changes committed first. It's not the magic panacea we were promised and I'm afraid that the AutoDesk sales people also failed to mention this very important point of working with Vault. Changes to files will be carefully and accurately tracked but if more than one detailer is working on the same file at the same time, it's not going to work seamlessly as it was presented to us. There are other features like the massive search options we're after as well.

[spiderdian]

we did that before, we didn't knew that the correct timing of checking in files will cause a day's work sent to trash. but those are the things you will need to understand. after that you'll be fine

[SuperCAD]

You shouldn't be allowed to have more than one user work on a file. I'm not familiar with Autodesk's vault, but I am with SolidWorks Workgroup PDM. With that system, if a user checks out a file and takes ownership of it, no one else can write changes back to the vault unless that user releases his ownership. In fact, if another user checks out the same drawing, they only have read access to it and can't take ownership or save unless they save it as a copy. But even if they save a copy they still won't be able to overwrite the original unless ownership has been released.