Autodesk Vault Family 2012 provides new features and tools that facilitate Project Management within a central interface. This introduces Projects – a folder collection of all related info for a job/customer/project – saving time, reduce navigating to various locations in vault and housing all data in one project context.
With Vault 2012, folders within Vault can take on new functionality that allows users to collaborate on a project basis and realize a more effective re-use of their designs. Vault folders now have the ability to become Categorized like files and have user defined properties assigned to them.
Along with Project folders, another new file navigation paradigm has been introduced: Links allow users to collect and share Documents, Items, and Change Orders across folders in Vault. This new environment essentially allows you to manage all data types within the consolidated Project context mentioned above. Links permit users to create shortcuts to objects, allowing the designer to share content across projects without copying or moving files from folder to folder.
Links are an exact representation of the original document (object) and can be created for files, eco’s or items. This means there is a simple method to organise all project Items and ECO’s actually within the Vault Virtual folder structure with the user security level still respected – a user is unable to operate a link if they are denied permission to the original folder.
This new functionality replacing the “Share” command means that linking is as good as having the object in the linked location but the object is still stored in one spot – one file or object can be linked into a number of project folders and unlike the use of shortcuts, the links are available to all users in Vault.
-Brian Schanen