Topic: Have you gotten into Vault yet?

[jpostlewait]

The one that is currently driving me nuts is what to do with Vault and how to manage it.
Vault has the capacity to fill your servers in little or no time, without careful management.
Problem is most of the management techniques in vault are manual.
Depending on smart end users knowing what they are doing, and staying disciplined throughout the course of a project. That might work fine in the lab but not in my world.
Those of you who have heard this lunatic in the Autodesk discussion groups please ignore. I'm hoping maybe to find someone who is also working this problem and has some suggestions.

John Postlewait
IS Department
George Butler Associates, Inc.

[Dinosaur]

I have been following your discussion regarding Vault on the newsgroup and I think you have some very valid points.  I can see why Autodesk felt it was necessary for a larger firm such as yours to have something beyond data shortcuts to allow multiple users to share data with Civil 3D, but I think they approached it from the wrong direction.  Whether they want to hear it or not, keeping all of the objects and data within the model is a mistake, especially when the model itself has proved to be this unstable.
I have the luxury "?" of being the only person in our small office willing to even try Civil 3D so sharing of data is of no concern.  Even so, I have been pulling everything I could from the model, keeping only the corridor and surface design there and reference other design elements back in from secondary design drawings.  The drawing structure is more complicated, but my file sizes are quite small and I experience few crashes.  Occasionally a data shortcut will break when the drawing becomes disassociated from the project but that is an easy fix.

[jpostlewait]

Dino we need to talk.
Call me at <removed by MP>.

[Bob Wahr]

Dude(?), I would strongly suggest that you remove the personal info and PM Dinzero with it instead.

[Bob Wahr]

Da na na na na naaaaaaa
MP to the rescue!

[MP]

Thanks for the heads up Bob, I probably would not have noticed without you speaking up.

TEAMWORK.

[Dinosaur]

And I thank you both as I am sure John Postlewait would if he knew he had just sent that out via RSS feed to the world.  It is easy to forget that CAD General and all of the Vertical App boards are open to anyone who drops by.

[jpostlewait]

Gives you an idea of what kind of morons can sign up here.
Hadn't noticed the PM feature.
Thanks for your trouble, just OWA'd into my office account and it appears no harm no foul.

Again, thanks.

John P.

[MP]

Go easy on yourself John, it's easy thing to forget these forums are global because the context seems so local.

[mjfarrell]

Vault; as it applies to Civil 3D is a band-aid to poor implementation of Project Manager as it existed in Land Desktop.
Vault attempts to be a document management, or version control application.
Civil 3D doesn't really require this functionality, what it really needs is Project Management interface.
As it currently exists the poor, or non-existant Project Management portion of Civil 3D is a major shortfall.
Vault is decidedly NOT the solution, it does provide some additional problems to work with, instead of Project Management that works.

I would enjoy seeing Autodesk get project management tools right first, before they try to dump this half-baked document management 'solution' onto my desktop.