Does anyone have experience with autodesk vault? I would like to be able to use it this year but I haven’t had much luck when trying to use it myself. I need to have this mostly figured out in about a week and a half. Is it realistic to try to figure something out this big with that time? I plan to use something like amazon EC2 to host the server because it is impractical to host a server ourselves.
We’ve used vault for several years, but this year we will be using something more like GrabCad instead. Here are a few things I have learned from vault over the years:
- Installation is tricky; IIS and SQL server don’t always play nice and Windows Server is pretty much a necessity (Registry hacks made it possible to run Vault Server 2016 on Windows 8.1/10, but not happily)
- Backups of the database are an absolute necessity (We have had HDD failures in the past on our live vault server)
- Sub-assembly checkouts can cause serious headaches on larger assemblies and in general checkouts/check-ins often don’t work
- People who use CAD need serious training about how to use Vault because an average user has the capability to render the entire vault broken by checking in/out the wrong files
- There is a difference between Inventor’s built in Vault integration and the separate Vault application. I don’t know why, but sometimes one works and the other one doesn’t.
- The whole idea of vault is version control and the ability of letting multiple people work on the same project. It fails pretty hard when there are check in conflicts or when someone leaves something checked out that they shouldn’t have
- Use C:\Vault to store the local copy of vault on each computer and then distribute an Inventor project file that configure the project workspace to this location.
- After several years of headaches, our solution to Vault issues is to stop using vault. I would highly suggest GrabCad as a much better alternative.
TL;DR: Don’t use Vault
I looked into grabcad and the only thing that seemed to work was the file sharing and sync. None of the version control stuff worked. I know a lot of teams use Solidworks and grabcad but its too late to consider changing cad programs 2 months away from the season start. I agree with you that vault is a huge headache based on what I have seen.
Here’s a thought to ponder:
It is possible to use Solidworks without a tutorial if you already know Inventor. (Though tutorials are still recommended.) I’ve done it, a couple of times. I personally can CAD in Inventor, Solidworks, or Fusion 360 depending on what’s available, and Fusion needed the most training (other than the initial Inventor learning).
BTW, if you had a little more time I’d suggest using Fusion 360, as it’s a cloud-based system, WITH version control built-in. (As you find out when you update something in one window and alarms go off in another. :yikes:)
Oh, and the other thing I’d suggest… You obviously know about the CAD forum. Try the Inventor subforum, and I suspect that inventor_phild (AKA, the resident Autodesk guru, or one of them) will pop up and ask some questions about your setup or give other advise. Or even take suggestions, who knows?
PM me if you want to discuss more, I see you’re in my general area. I don’t know enough about Vault to help you with that specifically, I’m afraid, but I have a functional knowledge of CAD (and I learn as I go).
https://i.imgur.com/hfdUKWv.png
Version control works fine for us with Inventor. It’s not integrated into Inventor, but it works well from the website. File locking is something we try to avoid through good communication though, because it can be very finicky. Not sure what the problem is. You sure you’re using GrabCad Workbench?
Yes, file locking doesn’t work. I’m a little nervous about not havin file locking with 6 newbies and only 2 returning members to our cad team.