Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010
Contents Welcome to Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010... 2 Vault Client Enhancements... 2 Autoloader Enhancements... 2 User Interface Update... 3 DWF Publish Options User Interface... 3 Folder Permissions... 3 Show Details (In-CAD)... 3 Auto File Naming...4 In-CAD Enhancements...4 View of Raster Images...4 Document Management Functionality... 5 Revision Management... 5 Behaviors... 5 Lifecycle Management... 5 User Defined Properties...6 Server Enhancements... 7 Autodesk Data Management Server Console Updates... 7 Portable Configuration... 7 Job Server... 7 Licensing... 7 Reporting... 7 Learn More or Purchase... 8 Subscription...8 Feedback...8 Conclusion... 8 Welcome to Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010 Autodesk Vault Manufacturing software, previously known as Autodesk Productstream, and part of the Autodesk solution for Digital Prototyping, securely stores and manages engineering information, design data, and documents shortening the design-tomanufacturing process. It helps design, engineering and manufacturing departments collaborate and share digital prototyping information with multisite tools to connect workgroups across discrete locations. Take full advantage of advanced functionality by giving design departments the tools they need to track engineering change orders, manage bills of materials (BOMs) and promote earlier collaboration through integration to manufacturing business systems. Key areas of focus for Vault Manufacturing 2010 are file revision management and CAD integration, including enhancements to file security capabilities. Improvements to revision management functionality include new and improved features for file revisions, lifecycles, categories, and user defined properties. Deep CAD integration remains an important priority, enhancing best-in-class Autodesk Inventor integration and Digital Prototyping. Finally, a number of customer driven enhancements are included such as reporting, job server, licensing, Autodesk Autoloader enhancements, and image viewing. Vault Client Enhancements Autoloader Enhancements Autoloader 2010 has several enhancements requested by customers. Now you can directly equate a mapping folder, thereby removing the additional steps required to define a target folder for loading, providing flexibility for establishing Vault folder structure. Other user-centric enhancements include the ability to manage/archive duplicates, an export format, a new stop button, ability to directly open files, and functionality to perform a scan without logging into a vault, making it easier to organize, clean up, and load large amounts of data to your vault. In addition, new threshold warnings for larger data sets have been added, giving you a chance to reselect a smaller set of data to upload if the current set is too large. Finally, upon uploading a selection of data to a vault, you can now review a report log of the results, helping you understand what issues and challenges were encountered during this bulk process. Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010
User Interface Update An enhanced user interface is available in both AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor. The Autodesk Vault CAD integrations have adopted this new look. User interface updates include enhancements to the application menu, the quick- access toolbar, the status bar, help menu, and the application title bar. Microsoft Office Updates The Vault Manufacturing add-in for Microsoft Office has been updated with consistent keyboard shortcuts throughout the user interface. In addition, the Open from Vault feature support has been extended to template file types, enabling you to start new documents from existing templates. DWF Publish Options User Interface In previous releases, the DWF Publish options have been controlled by an XML file that was difficult to locate and edit, and often could only be modified by the Administrator. The 2010 release of Vault Manufacturing provides easy access to an interface where administrators can change DWF publish options for CAD applications such as AutoCAD and Inventor within a single administrative location, and all users will automatically inherit the updates. The DWF publish options available within the Check In command utilize the administrative settings and publish DWF files accordingly. This makes it very easy for the administrators to control what is included in the visualization file and ensure that a DWF is created for every file checked into the vault. Folder Permissions Folder permissions have been modified to provide more flexibility and ease of use. The enhancement delivers a definitive permission set that enables administrators to manage users, who are included in multiple user groups, and control permissions to a folder when group policies appear conflicting. Individual user rights can be added to a folder that will override the permissions set by the group. You can now explicitly assign both Allow and Deny rights or can choose to set neither. The ability to assign Allow, Deny, or neither is similar to Microsoft Windows behavior, allowing user overrides from specified group permissions. Show Details (In-CAD) The ability to examine related documentation especially parent drawings and assemblies is now available directly within the CAD application with Vault Manufacturing integration. A Show Details command has been added, providing where used analysis and file revision history review. This new command is available for any selected file in the Inventor Vault browser so you can remain working in the CAD application versus having to use the stand-alone Vault Manufacturing Client to find related history information. 3 Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010
Auto File Naming Vault Manufacturing provides a mechanism to reserve unique files names from the Vault database using pre-defined schemes. You can then apply these names to new files during a save operation within the CAD application or when using the Vault Manufacturing rename operation for existing files. File naming schemes can be setup by users with the Vault Administrator role. These naming scheme formats are very similar to naming schemes for Items, providing tremendous flexibility for matching your numbering scheme. This helps company s overcome possible challenges from users manually entering file names based on spreadsheets, databases, or business systems. In-CAD Enhancements The status icons within the AutoCAD and Inventor integrations are now file revision aware with Vault Manufacturing. In addition users will have access to advanced operations, like Change State and Revise, which are available in the standalone application. Lastly, existing commands within Vault Manufacturing have been enhanced to support the ability to Open and Get specific revisions. This new integrated functionality within the CAD application makes it easier for you to manage and revise your designs from within CAD. View of Raster Images Users often create raster formats for renderings, sketches, and finalized drawings. Vault Manufacturing 2010 uses the latest release of Autodesk Design Review. The embedded viewer now supports over 20 raster image formats including GIF, TIF, BMP, JPG, and PNG. The viewer is available for files in Vault Explorer and files attached to Change Orders and Items. Raster images appear in the Preview and Files tab and provide simple viewing controls (pan/zoom); you can also view historical iterations. 4 Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010
Document Management Functionality Revision Management Autodesk Vault Manufacturing allows the use of multiple, interchangeable, file revisioning schemes which provides easy and accurate drawing revision management. The new file revision management functionality provides flexibility that allows you to quickly tailor the configuration to match existing company workflows and standards. Lifecycle Management Lifecycle states enforce state-based security models, helping the user get access to the right files at the right time to protect data integrity. Autodesk Vault Manufacturing comes with four lifecycle definitions out-of-the-box. The provided lifecycle definitions can be copied and edited, plus new customer lifecycle definitions can be created. Companies often use variations of revision schemes that are frequently based on legacy systems or workflows. Vault Manufacturing provides the flexibility to define revision schemes based off existing files or data imported from a pre-defined file, allowing you to rapidly match your company structure. Behaviors Autodesk Vault Manufacturing file revisions may be applied to selected files and all their related files. This is based on the selected revision scheme that is applied and can provide more control for parent and child files of a design. You can now apply a change to an entire set of assembly files, including related drawings. Along with the default states, custom states can be added to a lifecycle definition for additional control over a product s lifecycle. Vault Manufacturing has the flexibility to support your revision management workflows. For example, lifecycle state changes typically dictate the revision bumping of a file. However, revisions can be bumped to the next primary, secondary, or tertiary revision outside of the lifecycle state transition by using the Revise command. In addition, you can change, opt-out, and remove a revision scheme. This provides the flexibility needed to match virtually any revision workflow. 5 Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010
Vault Manufacturing comes with the ability to configure transitions from one lifecycle state to another. Using groups and permissions, administrators can define what the next available state for a given lifecycle is. The security model of a lifecycle definition can be configured to meet your company s specific needs. Permissions may be set based on users and groups per lifecycle state, with lifecycle security controlling file access. This makes Vault Manufacturing file access very intuitive because as you manage your files lifecycles, the security on the files dynamically updates based on the current configuration. Categories Vault Manufacturing 2010 introduces the use of categories. The use of categories provides more control over properties, revision and lifecycle schemes, by classifying the file and ultimately dictating how the file behaves. Categories are initially an opt-in feature for any file that is checked into Vault Manufacturing, meaning that a user must apply a category before any new behaviors or information are exposed. With the appropriate permissions you can assign a category to any file. To use an AutoCAD analogy, categories are to Vault Manufacturing what layers are to AutoCAD. When objects are moved to a particular layer, those objects inherit the layer s color, line weight, line type, and other characteristic unique to that layer definition. Similarly, categories allow the user to create standard behaviors for a series of files. These include lifecycle definitions, revision schemes, user defined properties, and security. When a file is assigned to a category, it inherits the category s default behaviors including its specific lifecycle states, security rules, revision schemes, and user defined properties. Note: A file may remain uncategorized in a Base or None category, taking on out-of-the-box file behaviors. User Defined Properties As files are checked into Vault Manufacturing, properties may be extracted and indexed for searching at a later time. However, many organizations are interested in managing more data than what might be found inside the files. For example, files related to design systems such as FEA analysis results, image files, text files, or CNC files, do not contain inherent properties or metadata. Autodesk Vault Manufacturing provides a common interface to add properties to these files or extend the use of properties using User Defined Properties or UDP s. UDPs can be used for tracking, grouping, and reporting. Properties Tab A new tab is available within the preview pane in the Vault Manufacturing stand alone client. At the top of this interface are filters for sorting the property data that applies to the selected file, making organizing and viewing property data easier. The property tab displays a thumbnail image of the file and provides the ability to edit a property that is empty or needs to be udpated. The definition of categories will vary for each customer and Vault Manufacturing provides the flexibility to meet process or product needs. Categories can be configured to assign manually or automatically. Some categorization examples are: Categories for prototype vs. production-ready Categories for legacy CAD files and current CAD file types Some customers may choose to keep categories separate for different system types. For example, a user might keep Inventor data separate from AutoCAD data, 6 Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010
separate from MS Office files and so on. Server Enhancements Autodesk Data Management Server Console Updates The 2010 release of Vault Manufacturing solves some previous challenges for Vault Administrators such as visibility into background processes and system logs. Now the background processes and system logs are accessible from the Autodesk Data Management Server (ADMS) console interface. In addition, the user interface and data display have been reorganized for easier access and management. Server logs are archived and available from the main interface. Administrators now have visibility and control over background server processes from the user interface, making it much easier to monitor and support the server. administrators to deploy Vault Manufacturing. Job Server Vault Manufacturing contains a Job Server that manages a job queue for batch DWF generation. This job processor offloads DWF generation to another machine, helping to speed the check-in experience for end users. Common interactions from Vault Manufacturing leverage the Job Server, such as checking data in from CAD applications or during batch upload through Autoloader. In addition, the Job Server queue can be used to track job details and overall progress. Licensing Vault Manufacturing will now leverage FLEXnet, the software licensing technology. Autodesk s corporate licensing technology, called Autodesk License Manager (AdLM), is intended to be installed on a server, and each named client that opens a session of Vault Manufacturing will consume a license from the license server, including CAD integration clients. Administrators can now monitor license utilization and report on their data management license assets in the same manner that they do with other Autodesk networked licenses. Note: A Vault Manufacturing client and CAD add-in will be the only supported method for connecting to a Vault Manufacturing based server. Reporting Vault Manufacturing now provides an easy to use report generation tool that applies search results to a pre-defined report template. Create your own custom templates to meet your company s specific needs. A new Report button is now available from the Find dialog, providing a easy way to select data. Portable Configuration With Vault Manufacturing, the administrator has the ability to edit and configure definitions within a Vault database and then import and export a configuration template as a.cfg file. Portable Configuration eliminates the time consuming effort to configure a vault from scratch. Configuration files may also be used as the basis for a new vault making it easier for The user is prompted to pick from a list of pre-defined report templates before presenting the full-color report. The templates are completely customizable, and new ones can be added to the list. 7 Autodesk Vault Manufacturing 2010
Learn More or Purchase Stay ahead of the competition with Autodesk s practical approach to data management using Autodesk Vault Manufacutring and the Autodesk Vault family of products. Gain access to technical expertise, utilize training and support programs direct from Autodesk, stay up to date with the latest product releases, and give us your feedback. Not only does Autodesk want to help you use the Autodesk Vault line of products more effectively, but we want to make sure our products are working effectively for you. For more information, visit www.autodesk.com/vaultfamily Conclusion We thank you for your continued support of the Autodesk Vault product line Autodesk Vault, Autodesk Vault Workgroup, Autodesk Vault Collaboration and Autodesk Vault Manufacturing We hope you feel we are listening to your needs and find that the new and enhanced product functionality helps make you more productive, your company more competitive, and return true value to your bottom line. Subscription Log in to the Subscription Center to receive product updates, log and view support requests, or take elearning courses. A valuable component of Autodesk Subscription, elearning provides a continually expanding curriculum of short training exercises. For more information on extending the power of your data management technology, visit www.autodesk.com/subscription Feedback Autodesk Vault customers can interact with the Autodesk Vault development team through several avenues. For example: Keep up to date on what is happening in your Industry, stay in touch with other industry professionals, and take advantage of a host of online resources at the Autodesk Manufacturing Community Portal at http://mfgcommunity.autodesk.com/ Talk with your Autodesk Authorized Reseller and support staff Your input is crucial to our success, and we look forward to receiving your comments. For more information on making the most of your software investment, visit www.autodesk.com/consulting Purchase Autodesk Vault Manufacturing or other Vault products through your Autodesk Authorized Reseller. To locate the reseller nearest you, visit www.autodesk.com/reseller Autodesk, AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Vault, DWF, DWG, Inventor, and Productstream are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product offerings and specifications at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. 2009 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.