Under the Hood

Speaking of AEC integration's (Vault Collaboration AEC Customers)

Speaking of AEC integration's, two customer testimonial videos have recently been published highlighting new Vault Collaboration AEC customers.  The first to be featured today is Cardno out of Australia.

Cardno, originally founded as a civil engineering consultancy is now is an international, integrated professional services provider locally delivering the specialist advice necessary to create or improve the physical and social infrastructure that underpins communities around the world.  They have more than 6500 employees in over 180 offices across projects in 85 countries, and have just completed a project with Vault across 9 groups.  The video summarizes their results. 

 

 

Who's your designer? (File Ownership Improvements)

In the last blog post we referenced a couple of inportant changes to site replication behaviors to address performance and user workflows.

The first improvement, site affinity, is designed to improve the communication speed and reliability, supported by improved server to server communication, the second change to replication is user focussed and relates to file ownership.

In a connected workgroup environment (replicating database and filestore to each site) only one site can own a file at any time.  Users on other sites wanting to edit a file need to lease it - the lease period can be set to a perod from 0 upwards and means that during that specified time (or whilever the file is checked out) no other user can request ownership.

All things being equal, that is, the file is checked in and noone has an existing lease on it, a user can request site ownership and go on to edit the file.  In the past though this meant working through a series of dialogs where the user would need to ensure he had site wonership of all files he was intending to mofiy before opening anything or try his luck - open the file, attempt check out, perhaps fail (no site ownership), go to Vault explorer and request ownership, wait, go back to Inventor and check out.

Vault 2013 now permits users to simply check out the file and we do the rest:  Check which site owns the file, make sure the file is eligible for change of ownership, transfer ownership and check out without any further interaction.  

To help facilitate this the default lease period is set to 0, meaning that as soon as a file is checked back in it is available for ownership transfer - you can still change this default setting if you wish to retain ownership in your office but the 0 lease period makes it simpler to move files around.

You dhoulf note that if a file is checked out or its site is offline you will still be denied access to modify the file - but that's how its supposed to work.

More information on file ownership and replication can be found here if you need to brush up on what this all means for end users:

Manage File Ownership

Connected Workgroups

Picking your favorite child (Set site affinity in ADMS)

So your family is growing and getting bigger, the time has come to starting ranking your children in order from most to least favorite - if only there was an easy way to do this!  Chances are if you are running a multi-site environment you probably have a simiar issue with Vault, as time goes by and our implementations get larger there is an ever stronger need to improve the replication between sites and simplify the end user workflows in managing replication.

With this in mind we made some important changes to replication, firstly to the way we choose replication order, Vault 2013 now allows administrators to choose which sites are the best performing in terms of connection latency, capacity or just simply reliability – by ranking sites in order of preference you can ensure replication is faster and more reliable. 

In the past SQL would take sole responsibility for which avaiable sites where used to replicate data, but now by setting priority in the ADMS console Vault will select the highest ranked available site.  This means most of the time it will be the first server on the list, but in the case of several high priority servers being offline it will work down the list until it runs out of ranked sites and then move to any “unranked” or undesirable sites to retrieve data from.

Too busy to set site affinity?  No problem, Vault will work as it always has, and if you only set one preference that does not exclude Vault from connecting to other sites if it is unavailable.

Photo: EvelynGiggles

Autodesk Vault Upgrade Documentation

Attention Autodesk Vault administrators, consultants, power users, and fans. New documentation is available that outlines best practices for upgrading Autodesk Vault. An F.A.Q. along with a white paper on the recommended procedures are all included on the Autodesk Vault Wiki site.

Details on upgrading Autodesk Vault can be found on our Wiki http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Vault/enu/Help/Help/0206-Autodesk206/0261-Upgradin261

Special thanks to Ross, Irvin, Martin, and Sara. Nice work!

Extended Communication with Autodesk Vault

The latest Vault Summer School video series posted to TheVaultKnowsAll is Module 5, Collaborate and Communicate with Autodesk Vault. This is a 10 part video module that covers extending valuable Vaulted information to other members in the design team. Topics include Microsoft Outlook integration, Project Dashboard in Vault,  Web Client, Change Orders, and Replication.

-Brian Schanen

Vault 2012 Replication Improvements within CAD

On the theme of new features for the Vault 2012 products, a significant enhancement has been made to user workflows. While you are working within Inventor or AutoCAD based product in a Connected Workgroup (Full Replication) environment, you can request ownership without leaving the application.

Within the add-in, ownership can be requested for the workgroup you are logged into. Users can request, extend, or release ownership of the files you currently have open in the CAD application. This tight integration allows users to remain within their CAD package, saving time, and streamlining workflows.

 

-Brian Schanen

Full Replication with Autodesk Vault 2011 Product Family

The next new feature set to discuss is an enhancement to Autodesk Vault Collaboration 2001 and Professional (formerly known as Vault Manufacturing) is full Replication. This is the next step up from our existing file store replication available today.

Full Replication

Autodesk Vault Collaboration and Professional 2011 software introduce an enhanced multi-site feature set leveraging both file caching as well as Vault database replication to help customers connect their workgroups globally. The full replication solution has been designed to overcome challenging latency and bandwidth issues often experienced when connecting workgroups across continents. The direct result provides each workgroup site with a high performing experience as the Vault data because provided to them locally.

A Scalable and Cost Effective Solution

The full replication solution offers a scalable approach to enabling workgroups worldwide. Smaller offices may begin using file caching to reduce the investment costs required to connect the workgroup. Vault allows companies to evaluate the business demands on each office to determine if full replication is required to provide higher performance in order to overcome latency. As Vault traffic increases at a particular site, the site can be brought online with fully replicated server, allowing the team to gain ROI based on user productivity and accelerated project delivery.

Coordinate data between sites

Vault Collaboration and Professional allow companies to aggregate data globally without concern for conflicting information. Each workgroup creates and owns their data. Other sites will receive the data in a read only fashion and are able to consume and use the data. If modifications are required, the other locations simply request ownership of the data and can then check the data in and out as needed locally. All data is synchronized between all sites per the replication configuration, keeping all locations up to date with the latest design data.

Selective Replication

Often many locations need light amounts of data from the Vault. The replication solution found within Vault Collaboration and Vault Professional now allows administrators to configure folder based replication. Vault administrators may configure file caching based on folders per site. This allows locations that are only working on a single project to support a local file cache for the related project files. This reduces the amount of file storage demands at locations that may have limited IT support or limited disk space.

Next, we’ll take a look at customer-driven enhancements directly focused on improving usability and increasing productivity.

-Brian Schanen