Content Center vs Library in Vault

[Lundrigan]

My company is currently in the beginning stages of moving to a Inventor/Vault design environment and I am in charge of structuring the content and processes for our designers going forward. I'm wondering what the differences are between using the Content Center and the LIbrary in Vault.

We use all of the typical hardware that is contained within the default Content Centre, but we also have a large number of standard custom components and purchased items (brackets, hinges etc.) that will need to be catalogued and put into the Vault for use by the design department.

I have done a thorough search to find the differences, but most of the references I can find are to the Content Centre Library, and not the other LIbrary which seems to be a different thing altogether, based on the vault explorer browser. I now understand that Library components are read-only which is fine, but is that the only difference? I like the option to "place from content center" so users don't have to navigate through the entire vault but if there are advantages to the Vault Library then I'd like to know before I start moving everything over (we're talking hundreds of components... so you can understand my need to figure this out first)

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you

[cbenner]

My suggestion would be to add your custom parts to a custom Content Center library.  That way everything is in the same place for easy access. Content center (I believe) is automatically a library in vault.  You can author and publish just about anything you want to your content center.  Others on here may be better able to give you the "how to" on this.

[pauldoubet]

Content Center is for families of parts, ipt files. You can't publish assemblies to CC so those would go into your library of purchased components, hinges, etc. There are advantages to CC files over purchased parts in a library location. If updates or changes are required to a CC part family you normally only need to edit a part from that family and then do a 'Replace Family Template' for that family. This makes updates much easier to manage. You can also apply those changes to all previously used instances of that CC part. The other advantage to CC parts is they are used by the different 'Design Accelerator' modules available in Inventor, Frame Generator, Shafts, Bolted Connections, etc. Items like UniStrut can be added to the Structural Shapes catergory of CC and then used with Frame Generator.

Also the Library location in Vault gets mapped to a Library location in your Project file which makes placing the parts from that location just as quick and easy as the Place from Content Center option.

Hope this helps, Paul