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Greetings Autodesk Vault fans. It's about this time of year that I see an increase in Vault deployments. Be it end of summer, everyone back from holiday, or just the natural cycle of our products, the activity level is up. And this is a good thing. Well I too am back in the swing of things, and have some notes to share with the Vault community.
I was sequestered away at a customer site this summer at a large Vault deployment – Vault Pro, Full Replication, Job Server(s), Items, ECO's, even SharePoint integration. Pretty much the Vault combo plate. I've put together list of 'lessons learned' that hopefully will benefit the Vault Community. I will also have some guest writers from our DM team submitting material, so stay tuned.
First, let's discuss some must-have utilities for any Vault Workgroup, Collaboration, or Professional implementation. The first one I'll highlight is Visual Lifecycle Status. This is a must have utility for not only using Document Lifecycles daily, but in your validation or QA cycle of your Vault deployment. This will cut your validation cycle significantly by being able to see all Lifecycle options based on your permission level.
A new tab is added in the History window, and when a file is selected, a variety of details appear. The states appear cascading down, with the current one highlighted in yellow. Adding to the fun is a grid mapping of transitions, complete with a description of actions in the left pane.
You can verify you’ve set up the lifecycle definition properly by quickly running around the grid and looking for allowed transitions (image above) and blocked transitions (image below).
We found this to be as useful for Vault Admins to test and troubleshoot as it is easy for Vault users to move files along their Lifecycle. Hope you enjoy this app as much as I did – it’s actually quite fun to use. You can download and read more here on the Visual Lifecycle Status utility.
-Brian Schanen
