Autodesk Vault 2019
The family of Vault 2019 products is now amongst us. Although the list of “what’s new” isn’t long, it is significant as just about every new and updated feature is customer driven.
Autodesk provides ideastation forums, allowing you and me to post ideas and suggestions for product improvements. We can vote on these ideas, pushing certain ideas to the top of the list. Autodesk takes these forums very seriously. I know that it is always a goal for the Autodesk development team to knock-off as many as these suggestions as possible.
“Autodesk Vault includes customer-requested enhancements to help engineering teams create and manage their data effectively and efficiently.”
I count 12 customer-driven ideas from the ideastation implemented into this new release of Vault. This is very impressive.
What’s New in Vault 2019?
Here is the high-level list of what’s new within the product:
- External Collaboration Leveraging Project Sync Capabilities
- Enhance Design Workflows
- An Improved Administration Experience
External Collaboration is the Name of the Game
Fusion Team
For Vault Professional users, Autodesk extends the Project Sync functionality to allow file and folder synchronization between Vault and Fusion Team. Fusion Team is the manufacturing “flavour” of A360 providing a team-collaboration-type environment within the cloud. For this to work, you also require a subscription to Fusion Team. This replaces the sync to Buzzsaw feature-set.
As Project Sync accesses the Vault data, it automatically understands files and file references, making sure that when you push data to the Fusion Team you are pushing all the required data.
Synchronization between the two works in either direction or both. The synchronization is schedulable as well, meaning it doesn’t have to consume valuable bandwidth during peak hours.
Shared Views
Vault 2019 provides enhancements to the Shared Views feature. This includes publishing options for Inventor files providing the option to adjust the name of the published file, hiding component names, and hiding the part properties. This mimics the publishing options contained within Inventor.
Shared Views provide a means to share a visual representation of the design, shareable to others via a shared link. These “viewables” are temporary visualization files (not native data) that automatically expire after a period of time. Using the link others can access this data to view, review markup, and add comments. The reviewers do not need any software, just a browser.
Thin Client
Use the new administration option to show only the latest released version in the History tab, ensuring those using the thin client only can access the right lastest released design.
Even More
Use the extended Pack & Go capability, integrating Autodesk Drive. This is a subscription benefit, leveraging the Desktop Connector to properly deal with the CAD references. What’s great about Pack & Go, is it collects all the reference files, ensuring you are sharing the entire project. Now in 2019, you can push the data to your cloud-based Autodesk Drive for sharing with others.
Enhanced Design Workflows
Inventor
Within Inventor, you can now check-out a file from within the Bill of Materials editor.
Obsolete Items no longer appear within the Place from Vault.
Vault Client (Item Master)
The Item Master now graphically indicates items which the design document file links require refreshing.
An Improved Administration Experience
One of the most requested feature enhancement, editing roles, has been implemented within Vault 2019. Using the updated Roles Management dialog, create, edit, copy, and delete customer roles. Meaning you are no longer limited to the canned roles, you can build your own!
Vault 2019 is Here!
As you can see, not a long list of new features, but a couple significant ones like custom roles. Just about every enhancement is driven from the ideastation, showing that Autodesk is listening to their customers. In addition to the custom roles, the process of sharing data and collaborating with others outside your company’s firewall is better and much easier. I’ve upgraded to 2019, are you going to too?
Feature Image: Pulvis, umbra… by Monika
