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?