Many companies will receive a contract that requires their designs to be keep confidential and secure to a select group of designers and "not for the eyes" (NFYE) of others. The engineering manager will often struggle with a method to isolating design files from other designers and still make them readily available to the select group working on the project. The process needs to be automated and flexible so the idea of using Window folders is dead on arrival.
Autodesk Vault Workgroup, Vault Collaboration or Vault Professional 2012 provides a secure, flexible and scalable solution to this problem. The process for set-up is easy involving the creation of a new vault user group, category, and lifecycle state.
To set this up we first decide on a property in Inventor files for the Vault to monitor and determine if the file should be treated as a part of the secure contract or simply added to the Vault for all engineering. I have chosen the "Keywords" property since it is already indexed by the Vault shorten my task by one step. I copy one of my everyday Inventor templates and rename it to be used for the secure job "Imaginit (in) - Secure Contract. I then edit the template and add a keyword "NFYE" for the Vault to sort on.
Log into the Vault as the administrator and create a user group for all the designers that will have access to the secure contract files. Vault groups are an excellent way to manage who has the necessary security for the project and can be edited easily.
Next I create a category for Inventor Parts and Assemblies. You can also create other categories for other Inventor files and supporting documents but I will leave that for you to practice with.
Next I set up my category rules that define which Inventor files, when checked into the Vault, will be added to these categories. I want to be sure that other designers outside of the secure contract work are not affected by the Vault changes. In my example, I have two rules, one for Inventor parts and assemblies, you will probably have more. Make sure the box "Apply rules on file creation" is checked at the bottom of the dialog box.
Next we need to define a new lifecycle state that can be assigned to our new categories. Most of the time this is a quick process because you can simply copy an existing lifecycle and edit it for these special categories.
Next we need to edit the new lifecycle and add the desired security setting for the Secure Contract group and all files added to the Vault category "Secure Contract". You have a variety of options, you can allow others to see the files but not have the rights to modify them, or you can prevent them from seeing the files so selecting files is impossible, much less viewing or modifying them. In my example, I am allowing others (engineering) to view the files but they cannot modify them. If I deny the read option, they would not be able see the files in the Vault.
The last configuration step is to assign the new lifecycle state to the two new categories. Make sure you make it the default lifecycle state. This tells the Vault to only add the lifecycle rules to the files related to the secure contract.
That is all there is to making a security enforced design project in your existing Vault. One last view of the Vault for a member of the engineering group as they would see files used in the secure contract configuration.
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