One of the most notable updates for 2017 comes to us courtesy of the Autodesk Factory Team who have built a really powerful integration for Vault Professional that allows users to:
- Publish Factory assets to Vault
- Consume assets directly from Vault
- Manage factory layouts
- Carry out where used analysis
Where previously users were prompted to store assets on a local drive or in the cloud we can now choose Vault, offering a local secure store with enhanced asset searching and trace-ability.
But not so fast – you do need to first up set up your Vault with the new Factory configuration (by creating a new Vault or importing the config to your existing Vault) which adds a number of new menu items as well as Factory specific properties and capabilities.
Perhaps the two most notable options you will see in your Vault Explorer is the layout and asset views. The Factory Layout view, once a factory layout is checked into Vault, provides access to which assets are used in the layout, and how many other layouts are using a particular asset.
Similarly the Factory Asset view displays data from an asset perspective to determine where an asset is used, how many versions of the asset are available, and instance level details.
How do you get these assets in and out of Vault though you ask? Easy, the new add-in provides a Vault option in the asset browser that mirrors the structure found in Vault – users are able to add and move assets to Vault from the local drive and retrieve assets directly from Vault via the same asset browser.
For more information on how to configure and use check out the Factory Design help here and start leveraging these great new capabilities to manage your asset models, layout and usage.
– Allan