Distributed collaboration with Inventor

[Ian Mackenzie]

Like most teams, we use Inventor for most of the design of our robot, but a lot of that work happens in a lot of different places (students working from home, college mentors away during the week, work at the school itself, etc.). I was curious to see how other teams approached the problem of coordinating CAD efforts between team members, as we haven't been able to find a solution we're completely happy with.

What we did last year was set up a Subversion repository for our CAD files (TortoiseSVN is the Windows client). This allowed people to work independently, commit their changes to the repository, retrieve other people's updates, and enjoy all the other benefits of version control - for instance, the ability to revert changes and roll back to an earlier version if necessary, and tag each change with a description of what was changed and why.

However, it wasn't perfect. The main issue is that Inventor frequently seems to save files when it shouldn't; this often happens when you work with an assembly, and when you save the assembly Inventor wants to save many of the component parts even if they haven't themselves changed (perhaps you've changed their position in the assembly or something like that). If two people working independently both do this and try to commit their changed versions to the central repository, Subversion doesn't know which one to keep and the conflict has to be resolved manually.

I know that Autodesk Vault exists for collaboration, and presumably it can handle those sorts of conflicts by knowing the details of the Inventor file format, but from what I've seen it only works in an intranet. Perhaps it could be tricked into working off a shared WebDAV drive or something, but I wouldn't count on it. Are there any other ideas or methods that other people have used?

[Molten]

For the last two years, I did all of the CAD by myself. This year another member is going to do it. It is hard on whoever does it, but it works. Please notice, we have not won any Inventor awards this way though.

We were experimenting with Autodesk vault in conjunction with the Virtual P2P program called Hamachi. Our initial tests showed it working fine, but your mileage may vary.

[pmax]

Hi Ian,
As for data management choices, I'd recommend giving Vault a try. To my knowledge it does not demand an intranet; many Autodesk customers use it in distributed environments.

Something to look forward to in R2008 is a much improved Refresh command. Imagine three team members make changes to three components, all in the main assembly. Each person submits their changes to the repository, and grabs the updated versions of all three parts.

In the past, the Refresh command would close your current assembly, and reopen it, resulting in a very time-intensive process just to get other people's changes into session. In R2008, only the files that need refreshing are reloaded; everything else stays loaded.

Good luck to the teams this year,
Pete