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Autodesk® Vault 2011 - What’s New?
Autodesk has provided tremendous improvements in the annual updates to its Data Management offerings over the past few years, and 2011 is no exception. Enhancements have been added across the product spectrum – so many, in fact, that to describe them all is beyond the scope of this article. I’ll address the highlights, however, starting with basic Vault 2011 and moving up the product ladder as I go along.
Vault 2011 General Enhancements
Improved Context Menus
The entire family has received a bit of a user interface
overhaul. We now have a more simplified method of
interacting with Vault in Inventor. For example:
Common Vault commands appear on the context-menu when you
right-click on a component – either in the browser or in the
graphics window. No more digging through the Vault
browser to find that component and check it out!
Office and PDF Document Preview
One of the great things about Vault is its ability to manage
any type of document. Many Vault users store Microsoft
Office and PDF documents that relate to their designs.
In the past, if you wanted to review one of those documents,
your only recourse was to get a copy and open it.
In the 2011 family of Vault products, you can view Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, and even PDF files directly in the Vault
client using the Preview pane:
This new capability should make finding the right document a
much easier proposition.
Properties Overhaul
One of the most significant changes in Vault 2011 comes in
the way Properties are managed. In past releases,
Vault properties (particularly in the basic version) were
primarily document-centric. Properties within the
Vault existed by virtue of the documents placed in the
Vault.
Starting with 2011, Vault properties are very much a product
of the Vault itself. System Administrators can define
new properties (called User Defined Properties or UDP's)
within the Vault from scratch, and then choose what document
type and document property that new Vault property should be
mapped too. This idea also introduces the concept of
Content Source Providers (CSP's):
Notice there are CSP's for basic AutoCAD, AutoCAD Electrical
and Inventor, as well as Office 2003 and Office 2007.
This means that Vault can not only read property information
from those document types, it can also update the properties
in those documents based on changes within the Vault.
In the upper level versions of Vault (like Vault
Professional), UDP's can even be created with no mapping to
any File or Item properties, allowing for system-only
properties. This can be useful for File or Item
organization and searching within the Vault without worrying
about how those properties might appear to document
consumers outside the Vault.
Vault Workgroup 2011 Enhancements
Data Mapping
Vault Workgroup benefits from all of the updates mentioned in the previous section. One of the most exciting new developments for the Vault Workgroup and higher products is the concept of Data Mapping:
This concept allows you to visualize important information about your model directly within Inventor. Using the same Microsoft Reports functionality first introduced in 2010, Vault 2011 builds on the idea by allowing users to run those reports with Inventor. If the report creates a chart object, that chart can be displayed in the Map Report Data dialog in Inventor. That’s not all, though – the chart is interactive!
You can color-code the objects in the graphics window based
on the report results, and even use the report’s chart to
create selection sets of the data. This is an
incredibly powerful method of information visualization and
interaction, and its potential impact on your productivity
should not be underestimated.
Data Cards
One of the biggest hassles in previous releases of Vault was
the need to constantly refer to the Vault client when
investigating property information. Vault 2011 now
provides the ability to browse and edit key properties
within Inventor itself by using Data Cards:
You can retrieve property information based on a set of selected components or for the entire model. The Data Card interface allows you to browse and edit properties as well as Select or Isolate objects based on selections in the Data Card interface.
Data Cards are completely customizable, and can even contain multiple pages to ensure information is organized in the most efficient way possible:
Should you already be using the Vault client, Properties
review and interaction has been streamlined there, too.
This was accomplished with the introduction of the
Properties pane:
This interface lets you quickly review the properties of one
or more selected documents, and will indicate if properties
are non-compliant. You can also edit UDP's quickly
from this interface:
Vault Client Customization
Vault 2011 introduces the Vault Client SDK. The API
has been enhanced to make customization of the Vault Client
straightforward and powerful. You can add custom
commands to toolbars and context menus, and you can even add
additional tabs in the Preview pane. The sky’s the
limit for this new functionality, as you can incorporate as
much of your custom code and interface elements as needed to
perform your desired task.
Given the power and flexibility of custom commands and Vault Client customization, the answer to any question starting with “Can the Vault do…” is now most likely yes!
Vault Collaboration 2011 Enhancements
Workgroup Replication
The primary new enhancement in Vault Collaboration 2011 (aside from those also included with either the basic Vault or Vault Workgroup) is the concept of Workgroup Replication.
When Autodesk first introduced replication to the Vault environment, it was somewhat limited. While files could be replicated to your various sites, each site had to connect to the same central database. While this ensured data integrity, because all users were working from the exact same set of meta-data, it introduced strict performance-based limitations on where and how replication could be implemented.
Vault 2011 shatters that limitation with the concept of Workgroup Replication. Now, in addition to site based replication (where each site works from a common database), Vault Collaboration and Professional can employ Workgroup-based replication. With Workgroups, each workgroup maintains its own SQL Server database. Workgroups communicate changes in meta-data via standard SQL Server database replication.
This completely eliminates the previously strict limitations on latency that existed with replication prior to 2011, and makes Vault Collaboration and Professional truly capable of replication data to users across the globe. To maintain database integrity, the concept of Site Ownership is introduced.
When a member of a workgroup creates or modifies a document or meta-data, that information is in a read-only state for other Workgroups. If a member of another Workgroup wants to modify that information, he must request ownership of the documents or items.
The process of claiming ownership of an object is
straightforward. If you don’t own an object,
right-click and choose Manage Ownership:
Assuming the current owner hasn’t specified a lease term (a period in which no other Workgroup can take ownership) you can claim it for editing purposes. Lease terms for newly created or modified objects can be set from zero (meaning any other workgroup could take immediate ownership) up to five days:
Vault Professional 2011
File-Based ECO’s
Aside from a new name (last year this level of Vault was
named Vault Manufacturing); one of the biggest enhancements
to Vault Professional 2011 is the ability for files to be
controlled directly by a Change Order. The familiar
Items tab of an ECO has been renamed to Records to indicate
that either Files or Items can be controlled:
Unlike Items, however, there is no master switch to restrict Document Lifecycle State changes to the Change Order process. To fully exploit this new capability, however, you need to take advantage of two new System Properties that apply to files: Controlled by Change Order and Change Order State.
Using those two properties, you can integrate Change Orders into your Document-based Lifecycles, ensuring that Lifecycle State Changes happen at the appropriate time.
And So Much More…
While this article covers several impressive new pieces of functionality that were added to the Vault 2011 family of products, it is by no means an exhaustive list. You can find a more complete list here. I’ve been working with Autodesk Vault for over six years now, and this is by far the most functionally impressive release to date. From usability and productivity enhancements to back-end changes that open up a whole world of possibilities, the Vault 2011 family provides a solid update to Autodesk’s data management offerings.
This page last edited on Monday, February 14, 2011
