VM 2010 Major issues.

[lscadden]

Does anyone else regret upgrading to Vault Manufacturing 2010? We've upgraded (downgraded performance) a week ago and have been having issues ever since. First of all the function between Inventor and VM 2010 may as well be nonexistant. I had an assembly of 195 parts, 2 weeks ago when we had 2009 it took about 30 seconds to "check in" from Inventor. This same file post 2010 upgrade now takes 8+ minutes. Also just trying to open a file from Vault thru Inventor is painfuly slow. Just to browse to the right file in the Vault from Iinventor takes over 2-3 minutes in some cases. This is one issue, another issue is during an "advanced find" in VM2010 we search for "Checked out by" then "contains" then whatever user... out of 7 of us on the system only 3 of us can get this to work the other 4 get a "ERROR 1013" which brings us to a halt there. Other items would be; why in the world did Autodesk decide to get rid of the neat icons it had to tell us who might have what checked out. We used to get a nice little "x" and we could hover over it and it would tell us who had it cheked out, and the check in / check out from Inventor.. we used to be able to check in/out the top level in an assembly and all under it would follow, now we have to expand the tree select or hold control key or... From what I can see this is a HUGE step backwards, it has become very slow and very clumbsy to use far too many checks and key strokes to get the same job done. There are several other issues our reseller can't explain either other than some of them were told it's that way by design..!?

[Anonymous]

We're not seeing the performance issues that you are. When we upgraded, IT
separated ADMS/Vault off onto its own server at the same time. We saw a
performance increase, but I'm not sure how much is VM2010 and how much is
the new server. Is your Vault install sharing a server with other company
functions at your place? If so, I could almost guarantee that you'll all
work faster if you give ADMS it's own sandbox...which means it's practically
a no-brainer to justify. Servers cost money, but cumulative engineering
hourglass time is a horrific, half-hidden expense that adds up really
quickly.

On your other complaints, you're spot-on. The latest release was evidently
all about the lower-tier versions, and Vault Manufacturing not only didn't
get much attention, it suffered a major regression in functionality. The
icon thing is all about some really (supposedly) powerful and (I guess) cool
tools that were added to boost the functionality of the two intermediate
levels of the package...but which do nothing for users of Vault
Manufacturing itself...except lose our status icons. A while back, a hotfix
was issued to bring them back, but there was some kind of problem with it,
and it was withdrawn.

I'd love to see Vault Manufacturing get some real attention next time
around. It needs it. Bad.

Cheers,
Walt

[lscadden]

Thanks!

We already have a server of your own. We supposedly have Autodesk working on it thru our reseller right now, Or at least I sent them all the log files which they requested. If as in some items in the past,.. that was kind of like sending probes into a black hole. as for it's new interface or work flow causes me to wonder sometimes if the Autodesk engineers have to use their own stuff?

[~master]

Are you kidding? Of course they don't use their own stuff. Well, to make tutorials and educational stuff.

That would weed out 90% of the bugs we are seeing. And these performance downgrades would be a thing of the past.

Then they would have to listen to their own employees, hmmm?. Some times I think they don't even listen to their customers.

[Anonymous]

<~master> wrote in message news:6271169@discussion.autodesk.com...
Are you kidding? Of course they don't use their own stuff. Well, to make
tutorials and educational stuff.

That would weed out 90% of the bugs we are seeing. And these performance
downgrades would be a thing of the past.

Then they would have to listen to their own employees, hmmm?. Some times I
think they don't even listen to their customers.


Autodesk is like any other big corporation. There's really two tiers of
reality there. In the first are the folks that are actually designing and
building software. They're sharp, knowledgeable, and they care about their
customers--us. The second tier are the executives and wigs. They are also
sharp, knowledgeable (evidence: Autodesk's obvious success as a company),
and they too care about their customers--the stockholders. As far as
knowing and empathizing with the users and their troubles, those individuals
might as well be from a different solar system. They're the ones who get to
tell "our guys" what they get to work on, and one of their greatest fears is
that they will one day give us everything we really want and need, and then
we will quit buying their subscription packages.

Thus has it ever been.

Cheers,
Walt

[Anonymous]

Actually, we do use our own product internally.
We have for the last two releases.
We experience the same pains as you, and that is why we use it.

Mikel Martin
Autodesk Data Management
Product Design Lead

-----Original Message-----
From: ~master [mailto:~master]
Posted At: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 9:28 AM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.

Are you kidding? Of course they don't use their own stuff. Well, to
make tutorials and educational stuff.

That would weed out 90% of the bugs we are seeing. And these performance
downgrades would be a thing of the past.

Then they would have to listen to their own employees, hmmm?. Some times
I think they don't even listen to their customers.

[Anonymous]

Mikel, if you (the Design Team), are experiencing the same pains as the
users, why aren't you fixing them?

Just wondering.

Bob


"Mikel Martin" wrote in message
news:6274409@discussion.autodesk.com...
> Actually, we do use our own product internally.
> We have for the last two releases.
> We experience the same pains as you, and that is why we use it.
>
> Mikel Martin
> Autodesk Data Management
> Product Design Lead
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ~master [mailto:~master]
> Posted At: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 9:28 AM
> Posted To: autodesk.vault
> Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
> Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.
>
> Are you kidding? Of course they don't use their own stuff. Well, to
> make tutorials and educational stuff.
>
> That would weed out 90% of the bugs we are seeing. And these performance
> downgrades would be a thing of the past.
>
> Then they would have to listen to their own employees, hmmm?. Some times
> I think they don't even listen to their customers.

[Anonymous]

Good question.

There are couple reasons.
1. we don’t always see the same issues. Every environment is
different.

2. Everything comes down to time. Working in a client server environment
such as vault adds a great deal of complexity to any problem. Just
because we may know about a particular issue does not mean that it is
easy to fix.

I know it can sound like we are making excuses at times, but when you
have a client / server system with many CAD systems and legacy data
and..... what seems simple takes on multiple levels of complexity that
most people will never see or understand.

Just keep telling us about the issues you see... we are listening.

Mikel Martin
Autodesk Data Management
Product Design Lead

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Stewart [mailto:someone@autodesk.com]
Posted At: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:26 PM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.

Mikel, if you (the Design Team), are experiencing the same pains as the
users, why aren't you fixing them?

Just wondering.

Bob


"Mikel Martin" wrote in message
news:6274409@discussion.autodesk.com...
> Actually, we do use our own product internally.
> We have for the last two releases.
> We experience the same pains as you, and that is why we use it.
>
> Mikel Martin
> Autodesk Data Management
> Product Design Lead
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ~master [mailto:~master]
> Posted At: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 9:28 AM
> Posted To: autodesk.vault
> Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
> Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.
>
> Are you kidding? Of course they don't use their own stuff. Well, to
> make tutorials and educational stuff.
>
> That would weed out 90% of the bugs we are seeing. And these performance
> downgrades would be a thing of the past.
>
> Then they would have to listen to their own employees, hmmm?. Some times
> I think they don't even listen to their customers.

[lscadden]

I can see that Autodesk uses some of this stuff but as stated it's a lab rat. The conditions are set perfect in a perfect world making widgets and programmed items that are NOT real world stuff. More of a simulated work condition. And this is fine however when the rubber meets the road the car hit's the ditch! And I know like all companies big and small, when the Executives get involved it usually makes an engineers life miserable. Which can also cause this condition.

Some of my complaints are that the new version of the vault (2010) "Check in Check out" procedures has been made overly bulky and clumsy to use. Before we had Icons which gave us vault status.... no matter who had what checked out. Now this icon only reflects our local workstations. Before we used to hover over the said Icon and it would readily tell us who had it checked out... now it just graysout the file in a sea full of black text
(Try and see that on a Monday morning) and we have to turn on the "Checked out by" column to see who the offender is. The 'Check in / Out' from Inventor We can check in a complete Assembly by checking in the top level but checking out we have to hop and skip thru to pick selected files. For what purpose did they remove the dialog box by which we could check and uncheck Groups of items. Now we have to expand the Assembly tree (which takes longer than it should BTW) in the browser in Inventor and select one at a time or hold shift to select all. Either way it's way more involved and time consuming to funtion!

C'mon guys, sometimes changing things just to chnage them in order to make 2010 different somehow from 2009 isn't really helping anyone! Frustration with this new interface fitting with our workflow I know, is the just a taste of what Autodesk SHOULD be listening to. And I haven't spoken to one person yet that has the "New Vault Manufacturing" that has thought it was an improvment.


Luke

[Anonymous]

We don’t just use our product in a lab (though we do that too), we
actually use it to manage our documents for the Data management team.
But I would agree it is not the same thing as using it with Inventor,
for example. Which is why we try to stay in contact with our customers
as much as possible.

As for the Check Out workflows that were changed. I think that we have
done a poor job of communicating this change and how we expect it to be
used within the CAD application.
The Get / Check Out dialog is not as much a replacement for Check Out as
it is a replacement for the Get command. This dialog has several
functions and workflows. For example you can Get Latest, or Get a
previous Document Revision. The ability to Check Out is a secondary
workflow in this command.

We also changed the Check Out command to be more streamlined and less
bulky. You will see that the Checkout command no longer has any dialog
at all. You may also have noticed that you not have the ability to
multi-select in the Vault browser. With these two changes you can
multi-select any files that you would like to check out and select the
Check Out command. All selected files are latest and you have write
access to will be checked out. Any files that cannot be checked out will
be skipped with no error.

Our intent was to streamline the check out process and also add
functionality to the Get command which allows check out, instead of
needing a second operation.

Hope this helps.

Mikel Martin
Autodesk Data Management
Product Design Lead

-----Original Message-----
From: lscadden [mailto:lscadden]
Posted At: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:06 PM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.

I can see that Autodesk uses some of this stuff but as stated it's a lab
rat. The conditions are set perfect in a perfect world making widgets
and programmed items that are NOT real world stuff. More of a simulated
work condition. And this is fine however when the rubber meets the road
the car hit's the ditch! And I know like all companies big and small,
when the Executives get involved it usually makes an engineers life
miserable. Which can also cause this condition.

Some of my complaints are that the new version of the vault (2010)
"Check in Check out" procedures has been made overly bulky and clumsy to
use. Before we had Icons which gave us vault status.... no matter who
had what checked out. Now this icon only reflects our local
workstations. Before we used to hover over the said Icon and it would
readily tell us who had it checked out... now it just graysout the file
in a sea full of black text
(Try and see that on a Monday morning) and we have to turn on the
"Checked out by" column to see who the offender is. The 'Check in /
Out' from Inventor We can check in a complete Assembly by checking in
the top level but checking out we have to hop and skip thru to pick
selected files. For what purpose did they remove the dialog box by
which we could check and uncheck Groups of items. Now we have to expand
the Assembly tree (which takes longer than it should BTW) in the
browser in Inventor and select one at a time or hold shift to select
all. Either way it's way more involved and time consuming to funtion!

C'mon guys, sometimes changing things just to chnage them in order to
make 2010 different somehow from 2009 isn't really helping anyone!
Frustration with this new interface fitting with our workflow I know, is
the just a taste of what Autodesk SHOULD be listening to. And I haven't
spoken to one person yet that has the "New Vault Manufacturing" that has
thought it was an improvment.


Luke

[lscadden]

MIke,

My complaints might be misguided or just misunderstood fully as to the operation of Vault within Inventor. From what I can see from Inventor, where we're forced to check in / out from or else Inventor goes into this "Edited Out of Turn" - "Save Copy As" loop which can't be cleared more than 2% of the time with the "Refresh" button. The other 98% we're forced to close Inventor to clear the memory etc... these types of situations force us to use the browser within Inventor to manage Vaulted files. In our case we have 2 seperate structures, "Standard Products" and "Specials". Previous version we could go into the dialog box and select "Uncheck all" on the Standard products and only checkout specials. I didn't see this option in the new one. Also to expand the Assembly tree to see a mix of standards and specials all jumbled together then hold CTRL and skip thru the list of 200+ parts...... I don't have to tell you how that one goes. It takes forever and about the time you go to edit something you find out you missed a few things. We used to be able to go to the top level and check it out and it Automatically selected allparts and subassemblies under it, and we could bulk uncheck groups of files by selecting the top level of each sub assembly or by "Uncheck" the top folder where the files were located.
Now to even pick a subassembly with in the browser we have to also individually select part files within the Sub assembly? Top levels work on Check in but not check out?
We've tried to use the Vault to manage files to get the dialog box and get / check out folder in order to expidite the situation, then as I mentioned Inventor drops the ball and even though we hit "refresh" it asks us to "save copy as".

Based on this I'd say the net result, at least doing it based on our work flow, it has be come far more Bulky and mind numbing to use. Steamlined yes but removing control functionality in the process? lighter isn't always better.

A lot of us would be happy if we just focused on fixing all the little quirks, bugs, and workflows vs. releasing a whole new set of bugs and quirky issues while trying to come up with a new "Cool Tool" every year to release a 'New Verison" and go to a every 3 year type of update plan. So far besides the workflow difference which your saying is designed in there, we've experienced slow performance Which a patch was released for, Files that none of us including administratros have permissions to get to and in order to change this we have to go into the file properties and allow for all users. This however must be done one file at a time. we can't select a folder and tell it to propagate to the files below? This for us is about 300 files out of 15500... and it doesn't tell us until we try to select it, it's what they used to call locked. In the Vault trying to search who has what checked out I go to "Find" "Advanced" search for checked out by / contains / john doe and it locks giving me a 1013 error. Which is needed way more often because the ICON to tell us quickly Vault Status and who had what checked out is now a grayed out file name and VERY hard to pick 2 or 3 files out while scrolling thru 1000 files.

Straight up other than not cooperating with the 3dconnxions deal and crashing for no reason occasionally Inventor has been workign and after the patch the slow interaction with the vault is fixed but the rest remain unresolved. I'm having flashbacks of R13 with C4a service pack before it was fixed.

Luke

[Anonymous]

Mikel, that does help a lot to understand the reasoning behind some of the
changes; thanks.

One thing it doesn't address is the fact that a lot of new functionality was
added to the lower-tier Vault offerings, at the cost of a major functional
regression in Vault Manufacturing. We really want back our nice, simple
visual indicators as to whether something is (or even can be) checked out.
The goodies that cost us that indicator are useless in an ECO-driven
environment, which is the entire point of Vault Manufacturing. We're really
feeling like we got the snub this time around--which is frustrating given
all the things in VM that really do need some attention. Is that hotfix
fixed yet?

On another subject altogether, next time you see the suit that brilliantly
decided to change the name, tell him or her that "Productstream" is easy to
remember, easy to say, and sounds cool. "Vault Manufacturing" is a kludge
of a tongue-twister that makes one look stupid when one says it, and is
really easy to confuse with too many other things called "Manufacturing"
when you work in an actual manufacturing environment.

Cheers,
Walt


"Mikel Martin" wrote in message
news:6276128@discussion.autodesk.com...
We don't just use our product in a lab (though we do that too), we
actually use it to manage our documents for the Data management team.
But I would agree it is not the same thing as using it with Inventor,
for example. Which is why we try to stay in contact with our customers
as much as possible.

As for the Check Out workflows that were changed. I think that we have
done a poor job of communicating this change and how we expect it to be
used within the CAD application.
The Get / Check Out dialog is not as much a replacement for Check Out as
it is a replacement for the Get command. This dialog has several
functions and workflows. For example you can Get Latest, or Get a
previous Document Revision. The ability to Check Out is a secondary
workflow in this command.

We also changed the Check Out command to be more streamlined and less
bulky. You will see that the Checkout command no longer has any dialog
at all. You may also have noticed that you not have the ability to
multi-select in the Vault browser. With these two changes you can
multi-select any files that you would like to check out and select the
Check Out command. All selected files are latest and you have write
access to will be checked out. Any files that cannot be checked out will
be skipped with no error.

Our intent was to streamline the check out process and also add
functionality to the Get command which allows check out, instead of
needing a second operation.

Hope this helps.

Mikel Martin
Autodesk Data Management
Product Design Lead

-----Original Message-----
From: lscadden [mailto:lscadden]
Posted At: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 4:06 PM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.

I can see that Autodesk uses some of this stuff but as stated it's a lab
rat. The conditions are set perfect in a perfect world making widgets
and programmed items that are NOT real world stuff. More of a simulated
work condition. And this is fine however when the rubber meets the road
the car hit's the ditch! And I know like all companies big and small,
when the Executives get involved it usually makes an engineers life
miserable. Which can also cause this condition.

Some of my complaints are that the new version of the vault (2010)
"Check in Check out" procedures has been made overly bulky and clumsy to
use. Before we had Icons which gave us vault status.... no matter who
had what checked out. Now this icon only reflects our local
workstations. Before we used to hover over the said Icon and it would
readily tell us who had it checked out... now it just graysout the file
in a sea full of black text
(Try and see that on a Monday morning) and we have to turn on the
"Checked out by" column to see who the offender is. The 'Check in /
Out' from Inventor We can check in a complete Assembly by checking in
the top level but checking out we have to hop and skip thru to pick
selected files. For what purpose did they remove the dialog box by
which we could check and uncheck Groups of items. Now we have to expand
the Assembly tree (which takes longer than it should BTW) in the
browser in Inventor and select one at a time or hold shift to select
all. Either way it's way more involved and time consuming to funtion!

C'mon guys, sometimes changing things just to chnage them in order to
make 2010 different somehow from 2009 isn't really helping anyone!
Frustration with this new interface fitting with our workflow I know, is
the just a taste of what Autodesk SHOULD be listening to. And I haven't
spoken to one person yet that has the "New Vault Manufacturing" that has
thought it was an improvment.


Luke

[djohnson1976]

I have to agree with most of what Luke has to say. We have found the new 2010 product to have a lot of "snags" when it comes to checking in/out files.

One thing that happens a lot is this: when I go to make a change to a part that isn't checked out, I am not prompted to check it out. Instead it allows me to make changes to the document "out of turn" resulting in difficulty at the end of the change when I think I'm ready to check the file in. If this happens I have to go and check the file out, but then correctly answer the prompt to NOT replace my local file with the old one in the Vault (or I could lose my local work which never made it to Vault...something everyone here has painfully discovered.) To make things even more difficult...sometimes after all that, we can't check in the file without saving...but we can't save the file (the endless loop that Luke talked about).

I agree with the icon situation regarding check in/out. This is the PRIMARY function of Vault for us...even more fundamental than revisions. In our industry, we almost NEVER go back to previous revisions. This capability seems to be more complicated than what people around here want to deal with. We'd rather see less snags with the transaction process.

Dan

[Anonymous]

Are you sure that you don’t have the prompts turned off?
If you are modifying a file you should be prompted to checkout unless
you have turned the prompt off.

Mikel Martin
Autodesk Data Management
Product Design Lead


-----Original Message-----
From: djohnson1976 [mailto:djohnson1976]
Posted At: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 11:34 AM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.

I have to agree with most of what Luke has to say. We have found the
new 2010 product to have a lot of "snags" when it comes to checking
in/out files.

One thing that happens a lot is this: when I go to make a change to a
part that isn't checked out, I am not prompted to check it out. Instead
it allows me to make changes to the document "out of turn" resulting in
difficulty at the end of the change when I think I'm ready to check the
file in. If this happens I have to go and check the file out, but then
correctly answer the prompt to NOT replace my local file with the old
one in the Vault (or I could lose my local work which never made it to
Vault...something everyone here has painfully discovered.) To make
things even more difficult...sometimes after all that, we can't check in
the file without saving...but we can't save the file (the endless loop
that Luke talked about).

I agree with the icon situation regarding check in/out. This is the
PRIMARY function of Vault for us...even more fundamental than revisions.
In our industry, we almost NEVER go back to previous revisions. This
capability seems to be more complicated than what people around here
want to deal with. We'd rather see less snags with the transaction
process.

Dan

[djohnson1976]

There was one prompt turned to "Never Prompt". It was the top one (File is OLDER than latest...do you want to refresh?)

Is this what's getting us in trouble?

[jhagarty]

I didn't read through all the posts already so I apologize if this was already tried/mentioned but did you turn off the Create DWG option (if it's available on VM)? I turn this off immediately because I have very large assemblies and having this on skyrockets the time to check-in.

Jim

[Anonymous]

A couple other things you can do to speed up Check-in and still create
DWFs

1. Use job server for DWF creation.
2. Turn on the "Screen Shot" option for 3D DWFs. This creates a high
fidelity thumbnail within the DWF for 3D models. You cannot rotate the
model, but it is much faster.

Mikel Martin
Autodesk Data Management
Product Design Lead

-----Original Message-----
From: jhagarty [mailto:jhagarty]
Posted At: Friday, October 30, 2009 4:18 PM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.

I didn't read through all the posts already so I apologize if this was
already tried/mentioned but did you turn off the Create DWG option (if
it's available on VM)? I turn this off immediately because I have very
large assemblies and having this on skyrockets the time to check-in.

Jim

[Gene.R]

I believe the trouble comes when you edit a part from within an assembly, it lets you edit it without checking it out, resulting in the "icircle". being that the vault is disabled within the browser while you are editing could have something to do with it.
hopefully I am wrong and it is my prompts,
Gene

[Anonymous]

Looking at your image I believe you are looking at the wrong set of
prompts.

Those are for Inventor modeling.

You want to look at the prompt settings for the Vault add-in. This can
be found in the Vault Options dialog (in the Vault ribbon).



- Mikel



From: Gene.R [mailto:Gene.R]
Posted At: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:39 AM
Posted To: autodesk.vault
Conversation: VM 2010 Major issues.
Subject: Re: VM 2010 Major issues.



I believe the trouble comes when you edit a part from within an
assembly, it lets you edit it without checking it out, resulting in the
"icircle". being that the vault is disabled within the browser while you
are editing could have something to do with it.
hopefully I am wrong and it is my prompts,
Gene