I have yet to use vault in any way.
When we went to bootcamp this year, i got thrown on the sales track to fill a seat, so i didnt even see the technical presentations. So I didnt use it then.
When Beth got sick and I had to do our road show, I blew off the vault parts since i had enough to worry about.
We have had a few people ask about Vault, and I usually take a good, hard look at why they think they need it, how they work now and what data they really need to share.
When it comes down to it, very few of the small to medium sized firms that I encounter really do much data sharing in Land Desktop.
These are usually the big REAL REASONS:
1) The EG is in a survey base- so it needs to be sampled on all profiles
2) They separate alignments from profiles so that someone can be doing plan while other in profile
Here is why they think they need data sharing:
1) Because every drawing they currently have is associated with the LDT project even if it doesnt have data
2)They mistake XREF (pretty picture sharing) with DATA sharing (terrain definitions, points, alignments) They think in order to see the alignmnet they need the alignment data, for example, when they could just XREF
How I handle the REAL REASONS
1) LandXML shuffle. It isn't super tidy, but it works.
2) The reason they currently do this is because someone is manually drafting and manually (dtext) labeling pipes, or going through the cumbersome LDT vertical alignment tools. That stuff flies in C3D and can usually (after a few projects and comfort increases) be eliminated all together. Not to say tha a profile doesn't need to be "touched", but it isnt being constantly updated with the latest engineering whim
Other strategies:
I find that people are usually willing to sacrfice a little dynamic-ness for some cost savings. Hmmm.... $60K plus in hardware upgrades, OR just wblock over some alignments every once in awhile. No brainer.
Another thing that works also helps keep the sticky fingers of the EIT posse out of the precious "Final Drawings" is the idea of a redline scrap drawing. Well managed, an engineer or designer can slop around with many different iterations of a design, then block or landxml over the final surface, etc to the clean drafting drawing.
I have a million ideas here because as I said, I am in Vault denial for the moment
As far as my own work, I find that my tolerance for drawing size ranges from about 10-20meg max. leaning towards the 10 meg mark. I currently have a 120ish lot subdivision with a big ol' corridor, a few relatively large surfaces, several pipe networks, etc etc and it runs in the 10 meg range. I separate out parcels since they usually just get in my way and i dont want them reacting to anything- so they get their own baseplan.
I have an Ebase, a Parcel base and a Pbase. That's it. Sheets and layouts also on their own. No viewports or layout tabs in any of my base plans. The only data that is shared is a LandXML shuffle EG.
I also have another project- bigger- probably in the 200ish lot range with a corridor+more and it is about the same 10-12 meg
But the issue here is QUALITY drawing size vs. CRAPPY drawing size.
If I receive a project from a client as an LDT project- and they say- bring it forward and work your magic.
The first thing i look at is drawing size. If this LDT drawing is more than a meg or two and they aren't mapping the grand canyon I look closer. There are exceptions, but at this scale project the big culprits are usually things like aerial topo blocks that were never flattened, drawing errors, blocks that are in memory but not in use and have some blip or corruption or elevation to them, things like LDT TIN lines that are old, redundant or just not useful, etc.
If my drawing is large for no good reason before I start adding Civil 3D entities, things will get out of control fast. A big reason why people feel they need Vault or some sort of whole hog project system i often because of things like "managing drawing size"
With all that said, there are certainly firms that really need robust data sharing, or really just want to use it for other reasons. So Vault is a solution.
But I never would point people that way without a really hard look at HOW they really work and what we can do differently.
