Under the Hood

Got an Idea? Let us Know!

Do you have an idea you want to share with the Vault team? We want to hear from you on our Idea forum. Your thoughts could help us improve the product quality and efficiency by telling the group what areas we can improve to help you get your work done. When the community reads your idea, they can add comments that could continue to promote the concept and give it a vote. The votes tell the team how important it is to the community which may drive the idea to implementation.

Your idea can get more votes if the community, and the Vault team, can understand what you are stating by being clear and provide details on the problem you want to have solved. Let us talk about ways to make your ideas better seen and understood by everyone.

Get more details here at our new blog.

Irvin Hayes Jr.
Product Manager

How to change Service Account / SQL Password in Vault

Challenge

Due to security concerns sometimes customers need to change service account passwords or SQL SA account passwords. This needs certain steps in a replicated environment, which we will discuss in the article below.

Solution

Follow this link to the new Vault Blog

Alternate Snapshot – The Solution for High Latency Connected Workgroups

Big customers have Autodesk Vault Subscribers in their environment with a slow connection (e.g. Asia). When initializing them with a new Snapshot, it can take very long time. This blog entry is a guideline how to initialize a new Subscriber faster. This is done by utilizing the alternate snapshot technology within SQL Server for big databases on slow links.

Alternate Snapshot technology enables you to transfer the snapshot via alternative ways (compressed FTP, CIFS) to the destination and prevent SQL Server replication mechanism take care of the transport, which speeds up the initialization process tremendously.

 

Please find a full walk-through the process here on the Vault Blog

Publishing and Manage PDF Files

In the latest release, Vault data management software introduced the capability to automatically publish and share 2D PDFs of drawings during the release process. Peter Van Avondt, Technical Specialist - Data Management, and Kamil Cejpek, Technical Sales Specialist, explore the different aspects of this functionality taking you through the steps to correctly set up this publishing process in Vault and show you the different publishing options. They’ll also teach you how to let users outside your engineering department access the PDFs for printing and other workflows.

For full details visit our new blog here.

Irvin Hayes Jr.
Product Manager

 

What are Custom Objects?

Custom Objects have been in Vault Professional for quite some time, but many people do not know what they are. Kim Hendrix, D3 Technologies, presented a class at Autodesk University 2017 explaining and demonstrating the feature.

What are Custom Objects?

Custom Objects allow Vault administrators to create new entities to meet the needs of their team, organization, or company. Therefore administrators can create a Custom Object definition and assign it categories, lifecycles, and properties. Once the definition is created, users can create instances of that custom object directly through the user interface.

For full details visit our new blog here.

Irvin Hayes Jr.
Product Manager

 

Windows 10 Updates Breaks Vault Server

We have had several reports that Windows 10 Updates have broken Vault Server and in particular Internet Information Services (IIS) on the operating system after it has been installed. Our product support team has discovered that the updates are changing the IIS user account and therefore the permissions on the application pool directories are no longer set appropriately.

For full details visit our new blog here.

Irvin Hayes Jr.
Product Manager

Fusion Lifecycle Tip! License to Thrill

As promised in last week’s blog, I have more tips from Autodesk University to share!  This one is a tad embarrassing – a common mistake that is made by administrators is assigning the wrong license type or group assignments when adding a new user.  Confession: I made that mistake myself just last week when adding a customer to the tenant I demoed in my class.  Oops!  It was easy to fix – the person I added let me know she couldn’t see what she expected and sure enough, I’d clicked on the wrong group when setting up her account.

I figure this is a good post to review the different license types in Fusion Lifecycle and clear up another question I get asked a lot (particularly if the admin was involved in the initial purchase of the Fusion Lifecycle).

Read the full blog post on our new Fusion Lifecycle blog here.

 

Switch Back to Inventor

If you have installed Vault 2018.2 Update, you are aware that Vault now using Inventor Server to process Inventor jobs through the Job Processor. The Job Processor processes DWF creation, updating User Defined Properties (UDP) and PDF creation of Inventor and AutoCAD files. If, for some reason, you would like to switch back to using the full version of Inventor to process these jobs, you can by performing the following steps.

For full details, view the complete post on our new Vault blog here.

Irvin Hayes Jr.
Product Manager

Migrating Your Autodesk Vault Server (Part 2 ADMS Detach and Attach)

While using Autodesk Vault, you may encounter the need to move your data from one server to another. Some of the reasons to move to another server could be due to hardware replacement, upgrades, or the wish to create a test environment with a copy of your production data. There are two supported methods to migrate your Autodesk Vault and its data to a new server:

Performing a Vault Backup and Restore and using the ADMS Detach and Attach command.  Here we detail the ADMS tool, for details on using Backup and Restore, see (Part 1 ADMS Backup and Restore)

Is the ADMS Detach and Attach the right direction for your organization?

Pros: ADMS Detach and Attach creates all SQL permissions and migrates the databases to the proper version.  You can copy the filestore, .mdf (data files) and .ldf (log files) directly to their final destinations on the new server. Subsequently, this method requires less downtime.  Using Detach and Attach is faster than a backup and restore.

Cons: Using this method will delete user associations to individual vaults – if you have created user associations to the vaults by the user, you will need to re-assign those users to their respective vaults, whereas if you have created them by the group, you will need to re-assign the groups to the vaults. You are responsible to separately backup/copy each filestore, .mdf and .ldf to the new server.

 

For full details, view the complete post on our new Vault blog here

 

Traci Peurasaari
Autodesk  SQL DBA / Specialist

Autodesk Vault 2018.2 Update

A New Update for Vault 2018

Vault 2018.2 Update continues the focus on improving quality and more efficient workflows. The Job Processor enhancements make it easier for administrators to manage and display more information on the jobs in the queue. Community ideas have been implemented addressing requests that help users in day to day workflows inside of Vault.

For full details, view the complete post on our new Vault blog here.

Irvin Hayes Jr.
Product Manager