Securing Company CAD Standards with Vault

I think I’ve covered this before, so apologize if its a repost. Good stuff though,and like other posts, it’s come up recently and thought it would be a good review for the 2011 release of products.

Autodesk Vault provides the necessary foundation for controlling access to all of your company’s engineering related data – and beyond. Aside from the data used in your designs, Vault is also an excellent place to control your company standards. In this article, we’re going to take a look at configuring your Vault to house your Inventor Templates and Styles.

The location of where Inventor looks for Style and Templates is set in the Project file (.ipj). In addition, the ipj holds settings for the Inventor Styles.

Initially, the .ipj states the path for Templates and Styles as [Default], which points Inventor to load these definitions from Tools>Application Options>File tab in Inventor.

If the .ipj states anything other than [Default], this is an override and Inventor will use that new path. This is where Vault comes in…

Whether you use the Autoloader to populate Vault or you create your own, you will need to configure the Vault project file with the override settings. The recommended location of the Templates and Design Data – local (each users’ machine).

This means that the Design Data and Templates folder will reside adjacent to each users’ Workspace on their machine. Edit the Inventor Project file (you may need to Check it out from Vault) to have the folder for Templates and Design Data as relative to the .ipj, or as a subfolder. In other words, Templates will be stored in .\Templates, Styles will be stored in .\Design Data, and so on. This also follows suit with the Content Center Files, Libraries, and the Workspace in a Vault project file.

This method is particularly nice as it allows Vault users to be mobile, and carry the data with them while working offline. This is also my recommendation on how to set up each users’ machine. In this scenario, the .ipj stays under the root ($) above all folders.

-Brian Schanen