For those of you who attended my webcast of “What’s New in Vault 2018”, thank you for attending. We had a great turnout, and based on the questions asked, a very attentive audience. I have always tried to instill in my colleagues the idea that you can’t know everything, and so it’s okay to say “I don’t know the answer to that question”, but you should always follow that up with “but, I will try to find an answer for you”. This is the basis for my blog article, and let me first apologize to those of you who asked questions and got my response of “I don’t know the answer to that question”, but don’t see your question answered here. I tried to note those questions that I couldn’t answer, but I know I missed a few. I am following up with answers to those I recorded and ask that you comment on this blog with any questions that you did not get answered. I will get responses back to this blog article as quickly as possible.
For those of you who did not attend the webcast, here is a link to the webcast:
http://portal.imaginit.com/Technical-Resources/Videos-Tips-Tricks/TipsTricks-player/VideoId/1482/Whats-New-In-Autodesk-Vault-201820170524-15011
As I mentioned, there were many great questions asked. I’m sure some of you were probably disappointed with the responses where the new features didn’t support your particular need. Several of these new features are truly ‘new’, and as such are the first effort to provide the feature. I think we all can appreciate that an inspiration comes to us, we design a solution, and find that the solution fits the need okay. We then begin talking with others and realize there can be many ‘what if’ situations that we could require an alternate approach. Another consideration is that we have an inspiration, begin developing a solution, and realize that we have a deadline to deliver the solution. What are the most important features to include? What should we start with, considering that we can expand the usage in version 2.0 to cover these other situations? I am sure that we will likely see these features enhanced in future versions of Vault.
For those of you with suggestions, I am including the link at the end of the article to the Autodesk Vault Ideas Forum. I use the forum to submit suggestions, many coming from people like yourselves, for enhancements to vault. You are welcome to submit your own suggestions (please first search the forum to see if someone else has suggested it earlier). I also suggest that you look through the submissions and vote for those suggestions you find useful. Autodesk will review the submissions and the votes tallied for each when considering the next year’s enhancements.
It is time to answer questions. I noted the following questions and researched the answers. As mentioned above, if you have additional questions, please submit them as comments to this article, and I will make every effort to get them answered.
Question 1: Are PDFs generated when using items?
Although the functionality appears to be available within the item lifecycle definition, currently this only works within file lifecycles. I have confirmed this with Autodesk. This could be a great enhancement request.
Question 2: Does Plant3D support the ‘Place into CAD’ command similar to Inventor?
I thought I would test this with AutoCAD drawings. While I did see the ‘Place into CAD’ command available to me, and I could execute it, I would see the processing dialog box, followed by an error that the function could not find an application to go with this document. This seemed to indicate that this only applies to Inventor components being placed into Inventor. I did check with Autodesk on this and confirmed that the current design of the feature only supports Inventor.
Question 3: Is the PDF revision synchronized with the source drawing?
Yes it is. I tested a released drawing at Rev ‘A’. I started a change, which incremented the revision value to ‘B’. I then manually incremented the revision to ‘E’, and released the drawing. After the property syncing and PDF creation ran through the job processor, I found the PDF was updated and its revision property is now set to ‘E’.
Drawing state changed to Work in Progress:
Manually incremented the revision to ‘E’:
Released the drawing and allowed the job processor to run:
Lastly, where can I find the Vault forums? There are two forums available for vault. The first is used by many to submit questions or problems with the current line of products. The second is the Ideas forum, to submit enhancement requests.
Vault forum: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/vault-forum/bd-p/101
Vault Ideas forum: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/vault-ideas/idb-p/2/tab/most-recentVault