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There have been a few older threads from seasons past about teams using (or attempting to use) Autodesk Vault, but no real solid first-hand descriptions of teams using it in their workflow.

Well, I wanted to post here and say, I successfully installed Vault 2014 and so far it's awesome. I've only just barely tested it with one client, but I can already tell this is going to be a fantastic way to manage our files. We had used a simple network share in the past, and it just wasn't cutting it. I am so excited to finally be doing this the right way like a professional workplace would do. THANK YOU AUTODESK for making Vault Basic 2014 freely available!

The documentation is somewhat of a bear it get through if you actually read it all, but if you can wrap your head around the concept of it, and follow a few simple rules of usage, it seems really simple and a joy to include in the workflow. I had a little trouble understanding how to get existing files into the Vault, but it seems the Autoloader utility takes care of it okay. I will also add that the installation of Inventor 2014 seems very improved over 2012. Everything went smoothly.

My setup for the Vault server is a Dell Poweredge 1850 with two dual-core Xeons at 2.8GHz, 8 gigs of RAM, and two 10k RPM SCSI drives in RAID 1, running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. I think we should be okay on performance. I have backups setup to the local drive, and then I'm using a robocopy command in the backup batch file that copies the backups to a network share on a different server.

I can't wait to put this in action. It really seems like one of those things you never knew you needed until you have it, and then wonder how you lived without it. Anyone else using Vault?