Vault Professional – Categories & Lifecycles

We are going to discuss today two essential features, who go hand in hand with Vault Professional.
Categories and Lifecycles

Categories

An essential feature is Categories. You can assign certain categories which already include lifecycles, properties, and revision schemes, based on certain criteria of properties. E.g. File extension.
Categories can be applied to Folder, Files, Items and even custom Objects.

Here is where you would configure your categories. You can find it on the behaviors tab, where you can go and change lifecycles, revisions, properties for a certain category.
Especially the category assigned properties are very handy.

And then there are rules, where you configure on which criteria (in fact any property you want to have), which category is assigned.
Here is a good Article for the assignment rule builder and here the help entry for categories.

Lifecycles

Another essential feature is the lifecycle engine. You can define lifecycles, you can automate actions on their transitions and you can assign security to certain transitions.
As an example, you can configure transitions from “In Work” to “Released” and execute multiple actions with it like creating a new revision or updating the revision block of an Inventor drawing.
You can check if all file properties are compliant or if the child files are all in the same.

There is a lot the Administrator can define in the transition rules – see the help for detail.

Important here is also to say, that the “Released” state is a special state and therefore special treated with processes like purge (see purge rules in the help).There are very good Autodesk University classes on behaviors and especially on lifecycles.

For security within lifecycles, I recommend this class from Irvin Hayes Jr.
We have this video in our help section showing lifecycles in action.

Johannes Bauer
Product Support Specialist
Customer Success Services