VAULT BASIC? I’ll be writing from the perspective of Vault Basic 2014 for two primary reasons. • To give everyone a baseline perspective of what can be expected between Autodesk simulation platforms and the version of Vault that ships with Product Design Suite 2014. • I have not upgraded my Vault 2013 Professional license (still licking my wounds from a bad archive and recovery). Vault Basic gives everyone the opportunity to catalog the progress of any design or study. Anything can be archived in Vault, which Scott Moyse and I discussed at Autodesk University 2012; it’s simply a matter of careful planning when Vault does not support that particular software.
Figure 2: The Vault ribbon tab in Simulation Mechanical 2014
What this means is that without this particular integration, you are likely to be up a creek with a very unintelligent drag-and-drop paddle. Fortunately, 2014 rolled around with basic Vault support for all Autodesk simulation platforms.
PRODUCT FOCUS
Vault and Simulation 2014
SIMULATION CFD Vault support in Simulation CFD, while lovely, does not include dependency support. The company used the very same solution Scott and I worked out, creating an appropriate archive from the really cool tools in CFD, and then manually overwriting the previously checked out version in Vault. The 2014 support simply furnishes the Vault ribbon interface to automate the process, which I am thankful for just the same. A note about CFD Archives in Vault:
Figure 1: Versions of an ongoing analysis study in Vault Basic 2014
GENERAL VAULT SUPPORT AND DEPENDENCIES When you hear that Vault supports your software, you might expect the whole nine yards of capabilities; however, that may not be the case. For many 2014 software titles from Autodesk, Vault support will include at the minimum a ribbon tab that includes basic check-in and check-out procedures. These tools also load the extensions that interact with Vault and help catalog the dependencies and mapping associated with each of the various files in a particular check-in process.
July 2013
Initially I tried checking the entire CFD structure into Vault Professional. Without Vault dependency support, this turned out to be a nightmare. Moreover, file quantities and the sheer size of the file structure was overwhelming for a Vault check-in. The CFD archive in itself is a blessing and makes the Vault process much cleaner. The downside is not being able to review your log files from version to version. We, however, wanted to perform the review and change process in PLM 360, so it was no loss for us.
SIMULATION MECHANICAL Vault Basic offers Simulation Mechanical users the following basic capabilities: • Archival and catalog support • File dependency tracking • Version tracking • Vault ribbon tab integration in Simulation As you can see in Figure 3, Vault does a fine job of tracking not only the file dependencies in Simulation Mechanical, but also their appropriate version relationships.
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