Inventor and BIM

[kobus.erasmusZ65VM]

Good day,

I am looking at the viability of using Inventor and BIM360 together to facilitate remote working - vpn is just really slow and painful. I have used this combo before so I know it works, using Desktop Connector to sync between the cloud and my local hard drive. However, this was a scenario where I did work for a client, using my own resources, i.e. hardware and software, and my Inventor setup was all local, my own Content Centre, templates on my local HDD, etc. as I did not need to use the client's setup for that and I was the only one working on a specific project.

But I am now investigating using this setup for a team all working in different locales, i.e. from home, from office, possibly from site. What are the thoughts around templates and Content Centre content? Do I put these on BIM as well, or do I have them loaded onto the different local pc's with an update when required? Looking at best practice if anyone has crossed this bridge before.

Thanks in advance.

Kobus

[CCarreiras]

Hi!

Why not use VAULT to manage the cad work for the inventor team, and use BIM 360 to share the final results to share with the other BIM teams?

[kobus.erasmusZ65VM]

There are some basic reasoning behind that from the company perspective:

1. The design office is based on 2 software approaches, using Plant 3D and Inventor, although a larger portion of the work is done in P3D. The P3D side is already using BIM and we do not really want to have 2 parallel systems, especially as the 2 designs do have to be combined quite often. Rather have a single project environment than having 2 seperate ones.

2. Vault is too rigid, in my experience it is too focussed (correctly for its purpose) on the manufacturing side only. Its not very friendly to being used outside of its comfort zone.

3. Expense - we already have BIM and do not want to spend money on Vault Pro.

4. To use Vault Basic (to overcome point 3) we will have to use a vpn again which frustrates the users with being slow.

5. And I like BIM....

Rgds

[CCarreiras]

I believe it's not possible to map the content center and template locations in BIM360, so I would set this locally for everyone.

[kobus.erasmusZ65VM]

Sort of came to the same conclusion, but if there is one thing I have learned with these situations is that sometimes, somewhere some seriously clever dude figured out a way to do it..... But thanks.

[CCarreiras]

Hi!

But... when you're working with a model, there's permanent communication between Inventor and the file, even when you do simple things like rotate or zoom, etc... so when the files start to corrupt because of lag communication, sync timing, etc... well, the problems will start to happen... Imagine opening a big assembly with all the constraints corrupted, files missing etc... that guy soon won't feel so smart...