Autodesk Inventor & Vault

Hi,

The company that I work for is going through the same process at the moment. We were going to use Vault but then our Quality dept. got involved and now we are heading toward Productstream - it has much more comprehensive drawing check-off facilities.

I agree with your opinion of Vault; I sat through the Autodesk Vault course but still it seemed overly complex. Having said that, the feedback that I have obtained from long-term Inventor users is that it is essential to have something in place to preserve the links between files. A small assembly may not be too bad if bits go astray, but life soon becomes pretty tedious if you manage to scatter a large assembly.

One other useful feature of Vault is that it obliges you to do some 'housekeeping' on your file structure. If your Inventor projects aren't in good order, they won't transfer into Vault.

"...users can delete and loose files just as easily as in Windows Explorer." This is true but at least it will be one of your team and not the IT dept. or other intruder!

So, yes, go with Vault if only for the ability to move and re-name files.

Interestingly, we had rep. in from PTC recently on another issue, and he remarked that their 'Windchill' product could do everything that Productstream could and more! the only question here is how much of your soul do you have to sell to afford it?

I hope that this is of some help.

Drew

I actually come from a PTC, SW, SE, Mech. Desktop, etc. background. I do not understand why all those programs work fine across networks and multiple drives and Inventor can not deal with that kind of scattering. Everything must be under a subfolder.

the biggest problem I have with Vault is the whole idea of forcing you to work off your hard drive.

Hi,

That's interesting, are you based in the UK? If not, there may be some differences in the software that we are using. Our current set-up (in preparation for Productstream, but Vault would be similar) of Inventor uses a central server to house the production file system with a single 'Inventor Project' (.ipj file) sitting at the top level. This file system is accessed by each of our eleven designers via the factory intranet. Each of the designer's Inventors is set-up to use the same Project so that a common set of templates, content centre, materials, threads etc is used. This functions quite happily across a network. There are still instances of local files, mainly for scrap layouts and such like.

I'm fairly sure that Vault is designed for network use, Autodesk will supply you with the required specification for a dedicated SQL server to house the Vault if more than one of you is to use it.

Regards

Drew