Integrating Vault Workgroup 2011 into work flow

[TheGrandEnigma]

Hi Everyone, new poster, bear with me.  🙂

My company currently has Vault WG 2011 installed but it is not utilized.  That is, some of us use it but most do not.  We just got the go-ahead to implement it but I am concerned about how that's going to be done.  It will be used across many sites over a large geographical area, but reletivly few users.

I have experience with Vault Pro 2013 (as a user only) and I think we could make use of all it's features.  What features are we missing with WG 2011?  The Autudesk website wasn't very clear and I couldn't find explicit answers in the DG.  If I'm correct we will be missing:

 - Items

 - Change Orders

 - Multi-site capabillity

I'm sure there's more, but those are the big ones.  A couple questions now:

 - How can we be using Vault WG across many sites if it doesn't support multiple sites?  Does this have to do with "replication"?  Using one server vs many? 

 - How is Content Center used from multiple sites (I've seen posts about major problems with that)?

 - Any advice on the best way to move CAD files stored on network drives into a Vault?  An option other than "manually"?

Thanks for your insight and patience! 

Matt

[mbodnar]

Hi

Active user integration and incremental backups would be a couple of other features you would miss

For your questions

1. Cannot use replication with WG

2. Use local desktop content for multiple sites

3. Try autoloader, not a big fan of it as it can mess up you Vault folder structure if different to how autoloader reads it

Hope this helps. I would try to go to Vault Pro 2014, much better version and more functionality

MaxB

[TheGrandEnigma]

If I had my way, Vault pro 2014 and Inventor Pro 2014 is the way we would go, but I'm not the one that makes the decisions.  It's easy to spend someone elses money, right?  I probably won't use autoloader come to think of it.  Our file structure is all messed up, so that will probably have to get fixed.

I apparently am not as advanced of a user as I thought.  There were a bunch of phrases you used that I didn't understand: 

 - I searched online but couldn't find anything called "Active User Integration".  What is that? 

 - Are incremental backups any different from "regular" backups?

 - Do I understand replication correctly as a multiple-server Vault using one set of data?  So a single-server Vault (using WG) can still be used from multiple sites hundreds of miles apart, just with possible slowdown?  I can see the same files as my counterparts in these other sites, but we use WG.

Thanks for your help Max, I appreciate it.  🙂

[minkd]

By "Active User Integration", I think MaxB intended to write "Active Directory Integration" - this allows vault to authenticate using your Windows credentials - i.e. you don't need to specify a password because you already did when you logged into Windows.

An incremental backup is essentially a backup of what changed since the last backup. They are generally much smaller (and therefore faster) than the full backup; but to restore you need the last full backup plus any subsequent incremental backups. Typically, a customer will do a full backup weekly, and then incremental backups daily.

There are two kinds of replication in Vault Pro:  Filestore Replication (aka MultiSite) and Workgroup Replication.  They can be used in combination. With Filestore Replication you have a copy of the filestore at each site, and with Workgroup Replication, each workgroup has a copy of the database.  When you are dealing with remote locations the network between them is often high latency and low bandwidth so being able to access data locally is much faster than trying to access it from the remote location. With that said, if you find performance is acceptable with 1 vault server being accessed from many (some remote) locations, then you probably don't need to use replication. If the number of vault users increases and remote performance becomes a problem, then replication might be a good solution for you.

-Dave

[TheGrandEnigma]

Man, don't come for a week and you're halfway down the second page already!  😛

Thank you both for the information.  I think I understand it now.