iPart/iAssembly in Vault

[jeff.noel]

First off, sorry if this should be posted in the Vault section.  It applies to both Vault and Inventor, and since this area gets more traffic I decided to post it here.

We are currently using Inventor 2013 and Vault Workgroup 2013.

We do not currently use any iPart/iAssemblies at all, but we do have several table drawings that were created manually.  These are becomming a headache to manage, and I'm thinking iPart/iAssemblies are the answer for us. 

What I am concnerned about is I have heard not great reviews when it comes to using Vault and iPart/iAssemblies.  I find some blog posts from places like Under the Hood, and they make it seem quite simple, but then I come across posts on the forums full of frustration, now I realize that people don't generally post positive experiences on the forums, I'm sure the actual experience of using iParts/iAssemblies with Vault is somewhere between the Blogs and the Forums.

We have also talked to some Engineering firms that say they had tried Vault, and given up on it, due to the difficulty of working with iParts in Vault.

I also noticed that in 2013 they claim to have made some improvements to the workflow of using iParts/iAssemblies in Vault, but never having used iParts/iAssemblies before, its tough to tell for me if these really fix all the problems that people were experiencing before, or if there are still alot of problems.

So let me ask, how much am I going to hate myself if I decide to try going down the iPart/iAssembly in Vault path?  Is it really going to make my life difficult, or have things improved in the last couple of years?

Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!  Thanks,

[karthur1]

iparts - got a bunch of them and I use vault.  Not really any problems.  Its just a pain sometimes when we upgrade and have to migrate.  There are certian steps you have to follow in order to get the parts updated so that Inventor does not want to check the parts out all the time when you open a file they are placed in.

iAssemblies - True there has been some improvements in 2013.  I have not been able to see how these improvements work just yet. In general, the iassemblies work well for us.  It depends on how complex your iassembly is really though.  It is controlled with a spread sheet, and the more members/variables that you have the larger and more complex it becomes.  Same thing with iparts as well.  Its controlled by a spreadsheet.  Its probably best to try and keep them below 1000 members.  You can have more, but things get pretty slow on larger ones.

Will you be adding members quite often, like on the fly, or are the number of members pretty much set now?