New Vaults Don't Have Lifecycles...?

[btillman]

I'm using Vault Professional 2015 and still getting my feet wet with the setup. The IT dept finally relented and allowed me remote access to the Windows 2008 Server so I could do some Admin tasks at the ADMC. And of course the first things that happen are not what I was expecting. 

1. I deleted some test vaults that were created by the IT guys a few weeks ago to get a clean slate to start with. In one of these vaults I was doing some testing and it had some files in the Project Explorer and some Items in the ItemMaster.

2. I then created three new vaults to be used again for trials and testing. Into one of these vaults I added 500 AutoCAD files but I left the ItemMaster empty this time round.

3. I then right+clicked on one of the files and tried to Change State on it. Before I deleted the above test vault I was able to Change State on files and the pull-down menu always showed me "Released", "Work in Progress" and "Obsolete". But this time there was nothing available in the life cycles pull-down window.

[mikel_martin]

WIthout seeing your vault I would guess that you do not have the correct role and/or permissions to transition from the state you are currently in to any of the other states. not only do you need to have the correct role but you need to have permissions on the transition within the lifecycle. In the lifecycle command we only show the states that you have permissions to go to in the drop down.

Another possible issue is that the category that these files are in has not lifecycle state set.

[Neil_Cross]

Yea I think Mikel is right there, the chances are the test Vault had been configured a little bit.  

When you create a blank new empty Vault, by default all files you put in there will not have any lifecycle states applied to them.  They're just files in a storage bin essentially.  It sounds like your IT dept had played around a little with lifecycles in your test Vault.  And it's worth noting that any lifecycle configurations are unique to that Vault, it won't apply across all Vaults although this can be achieved manually.

So to get to a point where you can get access to 'Released, Work in Progress & Obsolete' you'll need to apply a lifecycle to them.  

Generally this is auto-applied using the rules in the Vault settings, which lets you tell Vault to put files on lifecycles when they're first checked into Vault.  But that's about as far as I can go here without writing an entire training course worth of text! 

[herrerh]

On a new Vault, when a file is placed in the Vault it belongs to the Base category.  By default the Base category does not have a lifecycle scheme assigned to it.  So if you were to take a newly placed file in the Vault and change state on it, you will not get any choices as to the current lifecycle to select.

-Hywell