But the administrative overhead is close to squat.
That may be true for some users, but we have not found it to be true.
We are a small company with two offices, and only a few users in each office. Our second office doesn't even have a server yet - it's just a few computers linked in a peer-to-peer network.
We have need of sharing projects between offices. That is very problematic with Vault, especially given the state of our network. Sounds like there are people offering WAN solutions, but when we start talking about that, we are already getting well-beyond the "close to squat" overhead. The level of upgrading to our office network alone adds significant cost to the adoption of Civil-3D. Not to mention, we don't really have an IT person, so that means I cannot work on other things, because I need to figure out how to get all this stuff working. This adds significantly to the cost of adoption.
Not to mention backups. We we were already having trouble with tape backups. We can backup to an external drive, but that's not a secure backup. Just in the last week, we've upgraded our network and instituted off-site backups hosted by a third party, but now that means we get charged per GB for our backups. That means we have no desire for our projects to blow up into a huge Vault. Since the design of Civil-3D forces us to include our complete symbol library inside of each drawing, even an empty drawing template is about 1MB. So our project directories are already quite large. Vault makes this problem much worse.
Then there is the fact that Vault forces the user to constantly worry about which DWG project elements are created in, since doing this improperly can lock down huge portions of the model. This would completely remove the multi-user capability of the Vault, so it should be avoided, but it creates yet another thing the user needs to worry about. When the user must concentrate on mechanics of Civil-3D like that, it distracts from the real work.
Then there is the constant check-in/check-out. True, it isn't difficult, but it's annoying, and something we would rather not see in the program. It is a distraction from the work flow, and provides no value to us. It is merely something we are forced to do by the Vault.
As for disaster recovery, well you have a point there. But this is going back to something else that should never happen - a DWG file should NEVER get corrupted. Writing the data to a file should be one of the most-basic tasks this software does, and it should not be a constant source of problems. But Autodesk software is by-far the buggiest software I've ever used in my life, so I guess corruption-free DWG files is too much to expect. Still, needing to use Vault as "insurance" for the other problems in the software... well, that frankly sucks.
Then there is simply the fact that the concept of a "Project" is one of the most-basic concepts in this problem space. It should be designed into the very core of the product. For example, when we first start up the product, we should be able create a new Project, and define Project attributes such as Project Name, Client, etc. Then we should be able to access these attributes in things like Fields and Reports. When we go to perform any task that requires us to browse to a file, we should be able to immediately jump to the home directory of our current project, rather than needing all that constant excessive browsing. On the Survey tab, we should see ONLY the survey database(s) for the current project, and not every survey database in the Vault. There are many, many other ways that the concept of a "Project" should impact the way this program works. But since PM is bandaged on to the very top of the program via Vault, none of this is possible, and the overall usability of the product suffers greatly.
Then there is the fact that Vault is really nothing but a document management program. Including knowledge of Civil-3D elements in Vault is a programming error that will have recurring negative impacts for the developers at Autodesk. And since Civil-3D basically gets its PM added in Vault, it is not possible to use other document management systems in place of Vault. So if you are a large company who already has better document-management software than Vault, well, too bad. You can't use that for your Civil-3D projects, you MUST use Vault. That means you will now have TWO different pieces of document management software in your organization, which is again getting away from the "close to squat" administrative overhead.
I agree that there is value in using Vault. Data Shortcuts are barely-functional, and horribly clunky - Vault is much nicer. And there is NO PM AT ALL in C3D without the Vault. But Autodesk could've done this in a completely different way, which would have given C3D users very nice PM, but it would not have involved the Vault at all. They even could have created a radically different solution that would have created far better multi-user access to project elements, and it would not have forced the user to worry about which DWG files project elements were created in, and would not force the user to constantly check-in/check-out files while working. That would have been a FAR better solution than the Vault hack they gave us. But I guess we can only use the tools they chose to give us. I personally feel that Vault is a huge error on Autodesk's part, but we need PM so badly that we would probably be using it if it weren't for the problems with sharing projects between offices, and the inability to work on projects from home when using Vault.
