Multiple Vault Clients, One System?

From the way up north comes an AE with superior Autodesk Data Management skills. Michael Thomas from our Saskatoon, Saskatchewan office in Canada brings us a great tip on the Autodesk Vault product line. Mike is PSE and ATC certified and was one of the first to complete IMAGINiT's TakeAIM certification. With over 10 years of Autodesk software experience and his strong communication skills, he is highly regarded within the industry.

With the 2010 product offering from Autodesk we saw the introduction of new “flavors” of Autodesk Vault. This included Vault Workgroup, Vault Collaboration, and the renaming of Autodesk Productstream to Autodesk Vault Manufacturing. With these new products came tighter restrictions on how the different versions of Vault can communicate with each other.  In the past the Vault Client was able to log into a Productstream server and perform basic Vault tasks. However with the 2010 products  each version of Vault can now only talk with a Vault Server of the same type. This means, for example, that a Vault Collaboration Client can not log into a Vault Manufacturing Server and vice versa.

So you might be thinking so what? You’ve already got your Vault Server in place and your Vault Clients are communicating happily and everyone is checking –in and –out data to their heart’s content. But what happens if your customers or vendors do not use the same version of Vault? If could even be internal to your company, one division uses Vault and another division uses Vault Manufacturing. One of the advantages of using Vault is always having access to the most current version… i.e. live data…. and searching the database quickly. No one really wants to go back to email and ftp and being concerned with stale out-of-date files.

This is where post TS1106987 (Connecting to different versions of Vault 2010 (Server) from the same client) in the Autodesk Cracking the Vault blog caught my eye. It states that to work with a mixed environment of Vault types you need to install the corresponding client applications. What it is saying is that if you want access to a Vault Manufacturing vault you’ll need to install the Vault Manufacturing Client.

In the image below you can see that I’ve started two different Vault Explorers, Vault and Vault Manufacturing on the same system. The login information is different (note the server name) as each corresponding server is installed on a different system. In fact I can have both logged in and running at the same time!

Having multiple client types installed does not change the functionality of each client. The Vault log will not have any of the Vault Manufacturing functionality. 

What about licensing? With the advanced versions of Vault (Workgroup, Collaboration, and Manufacturing) the license actually comes from the server you log into. So if you have customers or anyone else outside the organization who require access to your Vault all they will require is the client. When they log into your Vault the client software on their system will “pull” a license from your server via your license manager.

This is all “fine and dandy” but what about the CAD Application (Inventor or AutoCAD)? When the Vault Client is installed a Vault add-in is added to the CAD application so that it can communicate with the Vault directly. How does this work when multiple Vault Clients are installed?

It turns out that the CAD add-in behaves very similarly to the Vault Explorer Client. The Vault type that you log into determines the available functionality within Inventor or AutoCAD. In the following screen shots you should see that by simply logging out of one Vault and into another the functionality available to Inventor is adjusted automatically. Notice the additional icons in the ribbon (Control Panel) as well as the slight difference in the Vault browser (Vault Manufacturing highlights checked-out files in blue). In fact the “Go to Vault” icon will even launch the appropriate version of Vault Explorer!

So even if you can no longer use your Vault client to log into Productstream this does not mean that you are limited to access to only one Vault type.

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It turns out that the CAD add-in behaves very similarly to the Vault Explorer Client. The Vault type that you log into determines the available functionality within Inventor or AutoCAD.