Inventor in the cloud?

[Anonymous]

I work at a small company that has four design engineers at three different sites, two in Canada and one in Switzerland.  Up until now, the sites have developed separate product lines and have operated almost completely independently.  So no integration of CAD data has ever been attempted.  All four engineers use Inventor, but from a CAD data point of view the sites are silos.

Now we want to launch a global project doing collaborative design work from all three sites simultaneously.  We looked into setting up a Vault system with synchronized servers, but the company's owners choked on the quote.  We also have very rudimentary internal IT resources and, frankly, I think a system we tried to manage ourselves would likely be a disaster.  So I have tentatively concluded that our best option is to have our CAD data in the cloud.

Now the question is what service do we use?  Most cloud services seem to be either simple document sharing systems (a la DropBox) or sophisticated software-on-demand/virtualized environments.  I don't think either is appropriate for us.  All we need is cloud file storage but with support for Inventor's check-in/check-out capability (as a minimum).  I guess we should also plan for a future Vault implementation.

I would appreciate any suggestions anyone might have on possible solutions for us.

[blair]

Or Fusion 360

http://fusion360.autodesk.com/about

[JDMather]

Or

Autodesk 360

https://360.autodesk.com/landing

[Anonymous]

We want to continue using Inventor, so Fusion 360 is not the right solution.

I was told by our reseller that Autodesk 360 would not be the right solution for us either, but I can't remember the details now.  I think it was because it did not support Inventor's check-in/check-out methodology, so we would not be able to prevent collisions.  But I might be misremembering that.

I did find one solution that looks quite promising.  It's EpiGrid's cloud-based PDM service:  http://www.epigrid.com.  This is built around SolidWorks EPDM, which is not exactly what we're looking for.  But I have seen a demo of SW EPDM working with Inventor and it does seem to be well integrated with it.  EpiGrid is offering a two week trial for $500, which would give us an opportunity to see how well it works with Inventor without spending a lot of money.

I would prefer to use something that was designed from the ground up by, or in conjunction with, Autodesk.  But there doesn't seem to be any such thing.  Our needs seem to fall into a niche that hasn't been addressed by anyone other than EpiGrid.

[blair]

Yes, the Autodesk 360 doesn not have any Vault function and file checking. Not sure if the Autodesk Remote Setup

http://autodeskmfg.typepad.com/blog/2013/07/autodesk-remote-launched-for-subscription-customers.html 

would work for you.

[JDMather]

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@Anonymous wrote:

We want to continue using Inventor, so Fusion 360 is not the right solution.

I was told by our reseller that Autodesk 360 would not be the right solution for us either, .....

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Did you know all of this before posting your question here?

[blair]

What you want to do and will have to do are completely different.

[Anonymous]

"Did you know all of this before posting your question here?"

Yes, but I'm very curious why you would ask.  Perhaps you can explain why it matters.

[blair]

Most likely it has to do with time management and reinventing the wheel.

[PaulMunford]

You could also look at 'Flatter Files', and Grabcad 'Workbench' (and you could get another Vault qoute from a competitor!)

http://www.flatterfiles.com/

http://grabcad.com/workbench