Problems of using Vault 2013 with Inventor 2012

[smilinger]

We have several customers who have just started to use vault so they purchased vault 2013 but stayed on inventor 2012.

There are many problems using vault 2013 versions with inventor 2012:

1. Some great enhancements in Vault 2013 are not available in inventor 2012 add-in, because Autodesk is too lazy to create new vault add-in updates for old Inventor versions as they had done before, instead they just make vault 2013 server accessible for 2012 clients, and they call this an enhancement.
2. Because of this enhancement you have to install inventor 2012 + Vault 2012 (basic client at least) + Vault 2013.
3. Autoloader 2013 will not work for inventor 2012 (at least on x64 platform), it will just crash. So we have to use the 2012 version autoloader.
4. You cannot edit properties on Inventor 2012 DWG drawings in vault 2013, the vault explorer will crash and leaving the files in checked out status.
5. Also try to do "synchronize properties" on Inventor 2012 DWG, it crash again. Try to send this job to your job server, maybe it will crash the job processor.

So the truth is, If you want to upgrade to vault 2013, remember to upgrade you inventor to 2013 either. Otherwise, wait until all of this is fixed, hoping they will fix this.

By the way, if you have installed both 2012 and 2013 versions of inventor, things will depend on your last inventor session, if your last inventor session is 2012, it will crash, if your last inventor session is 2013, it will not crash.

[olearya]

Thanks for your feedback here.

The support for 2012 is a deliberate design to reduce migration impact on companies and allow organizations to stagger the roll out of their software upgrades.  

The task of testing and migrating production server side upgrades and rolling out client software was becoming a barrier for many, this approach allows for the clients to be upgraded on demand reducing impact on IT and design.  ADMS 2013 will still deliver all server side enhancements but as we are not installing client components these add ins will behave as before.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for posting this, we are having the same issue with Vault Professional 2013 and Inventor 2012. Any time we try to sync properties or edit properties on Inventer dwg drawings or it crashes. Vault doesnt read UDP properties for a set of legacy drawings. We are working with support to get this resolved.