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Autodesk Vault File Structure and Training
CD community,
I am wondering if anyone has a quick reference guide to setting up a Project file and folder structure for use with Autodesk Vault in Inventor, as well as any training materials for students on how to check in/check out files within the Vault structure.
Some quick background: I know just enough to be dangerous in Inventor, and am not well-versed in using the project file and working directory myself. Our team CAD work to this point has been largely single-user, one-off efforts with no file management or version control. I would like to elevate the team’s use of CAD for design work and would like to implement the use of Vault with Inventor.
Our team owns one computer which runs Vault Server 2011 (I found the install disc from the 2011 KOP). This will also be the primary “working” computer for our CAD team working in Inventor 2011. The school’s computer lab has Inventor 2011 installed, so we have chosen to work in 2011 on our team computer to enable students to transfer their work back and forth. The school computers have Vault client installed, and are able to successfully connect to our server, but do not appear to have the Inventor plug-in for Vault installed (the Vault check-in/check-out menu is not available). I will pursue working with the IT dept to see if we can get them to run the Inventor Vault plug-in, but for now we may have to transfer files with a jump drive to the main computer to check them in (our CAD team is not too large, so this should be manageable for now if we can get the workflow correct).
I am struggling a bit to understand the relationship between the location of the Vault folder, Inventor project file, working directory, Content Center files, libraries, etc. and how these should be set up on our main computer to keep things clean and usable. I currently have errors when starting a new part that the texture files cannot be found, and I believe last year we had some file reference issues when trying to use downloaded parts in our assembly. I believe this could be because the default installation of Inventor created a directory location within “My Documents.” In general, we would like to store most of our files (especially all of our Vault files) on the K drive, which is a larger storage partition. The “My Documents” target has been moved from the standard location on the boot partition (C), to the K drive. We also have two user accounts (Mentor and Student) set up on the computer. In addition to 2011, we also have Inventor 2012 installed, which may be complicating things more by creating duplicate directories. I am considering uninstalling both Inventor versions and starting fresh to be able to carefully set up the proper locations from scratch, but I’m not sure what the recommended setup should be. I’m also looking for recommendations on how to set up our Project file structure. Should we have one project per year? One for prototyping then one for robot design? Just one overall project file with separate sub-folders under it? Should I try to set up the 2013 KOP as a library? Any recommendations (or screen shots of a setup that works for you) would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Katie
Mentor, FRC 2052 KnightKrawler
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