FIles Types Usable in Autodesk Vault

[Anonymous]

Please forgive my ignorance if I am misunderstanding the purpose of the program "Autodesk Vault".

The company I work for is looking to update it's drawing archive database. The drawings are currently accessed through a program that was written by a former employee in the IT department and over time with operating systems updating, the rest of the IT department have struggled to get the program working on all our machines. It's got to the point where only one of us in the department can access the old drawings.

The IT department have suggested Autodesk Vault as a possible replacement and I've been charged with assessing it's suitibility so if any Autodesk reps can answer my questions here that would be very helpful...

1) Currently a large number of the archive drawings are in .rlc format. Would it be possible to simply copy these accross to Autodesk Vault and have it handle them, or do we need to get hold of some kind of batch converter?

2) Each drawing has an associated list of searchable fields in the program we currently use. Obviously there is no way of knowing if this database can be transferred without knowing specifically how it is formatted, but generally are there ways of converting databases to Autodesk vault? What formats of database can it accept?

Thanks for any information anyone can offer.

Kind regards

Wayne.

[olearya]

HI Wayne,

This doesn't sound like it will be too much of an issue.  Autodesk Vault enables you to store documents of ANY type, it is then just a matter of how capable we are of exposing that file formats detail / viewing etc.

I would suggest of course that any machine wanting to view or edit an RLC file would need to have an application installed to enable this but you should be able to bulk load these files pretty simply.  If you did want to have a more "native" preview and plot experience these files could be converted to a PDF, tiff etc of course but shouldn't be required.

In terms of the existing document properties it is possible to import file data from your existing database into Vault for richer doc search (This should be as simple as .csv file out to get the raw data) but this would require either Vault Workgroup or Vault Professional.  Vault Basic does not support user defined properties.

It would be highly advisable here to enlist Autodesk consulting services for large data sets, use a partner or look at a 3rd party tool like dataloader from CoolOrange.

Ultimately there is a great deal more information we would need to help you select the correct product for your environment, looking at how many people modify vs consume files, what other tools you may need, so it is worth while contacting a local partner to discuss all your requirements beyond simple dataloading.

Hope this helps!