How are people handling this mess that Autodesk has given us?
I've started creating a folder for each Project. Each Project has a Survey database called Cogo inside the Project folder. When I want to work on a project, I go to Projects on the Prospector and set the working folder to the Project folder. This makes the Cogo databsae visible as an available database; I load it. I can now work in drawings in this project, all of which are also in the Project folder. I also have a variety of other folders inside the Project folder, for various items related to the project (a Survey folder for field data dumps, etc.). Net result, I have a setup much like in Land Desktop, except I have to manually browse to the Survey Database every time I switch projects.
This has two benefits: 1) I don't end up with a horribly long list of Survey databases, and 2) it is easy to archive the Survey database along with the drawings, since everything is in the same Project folder.
Of course, the drawback is that it's more of a manual process than in Land Desktop. Kind of awkward, from a usability perspective. But it seems to work. I also have a "template folder" setup, with a pre-configured empty Survey database inside it (so I don't have to reconfigure the database every time I create a project.) So when I start a new project, I just make a copy of my "template folder", and it already has a configured, empty database ready to go.
We may move to the Vault at some point. But the Vault documentation itself warns that, unless you have SQL Server up, it won't work for more than a few users and projects, and you must regularly purge the database. I don't see the point in having a version control system that must be regularly purged, and we don't want to deal with SQL Server right now, so we're trying to use C3D without the Vault. So far, it looks like we can do it, even though it's a bit on the ugly side. From what I hear, Vault is pretty ugly, too...
