Is vault worth the investment?

[Anonymous]

We are a 50 employee civil engineering firm with three offices, one of which has a very, very, slow internet connection. We are considering Vault Professional for coordinating between sites and managing all of our files, but the price tag to get started is quite large. I would like to hear from other small firms regarding their experience with Vault Professional and if you feel you get your money's worth.

Do you just use vault for Civil 3D files or all of your project files?

Thank you.

[Neil_Cross]

There's a lot of us here who have worked with vault as a customer and as CAD suppliers putting vault into a lot of customers.

It depends on your perspective but I think Vault is quite a relatively inexpensive data management solution when compared to some others. If you're spread over 3 sites and have dozens of users, based on the limited info you've gave I'd say it sounds like a typical vault pro setup. 

I cant ant stress enough how important it is in a pro site that it's implemented properly from day 1 by someone who knows what they're doing and knows what you need.  And to answer your last question, although vault can store all files, most just put CAD files in there.  Else everyone outside of the engineering team will need a vault license and that'll get very expensive. Normal project data would typically stay outside of vault on your usual file servers. 

[TravisNave]

Neil is exactly right and is a great resource to address Vault CBAs. I can also attest, having been thru ISO9000, the importance of document mananagement systems -- especially with projects shared across many users.  Protection against shared project overwrites and version control are paramount to every aspect of electronic data today.  I often compare Vault to Microsoft Visual Source Safe.  If you have ever used that product and understand the need and importance for document data management, then it is not far of a jump to undertand that idea for your engineering CAD data. 

[ryan]

My first advice would be to look at the feature set of Vault Pro and identify what features, in addition to file replication, are advantageous to you.    If your only need is better performance across geographic sites, Vault is probably not the most cost-effective or ideal solution.   You'd be better off looking at a solution like Panzura.  Contact me directly if you want more information on it.

Being that I'm with an Autodesk VAR for 15+ years, I'm obviously very Pro Vault-Pro (haha) since it can do so much more than just file replication (document security and workflow, change management, web client for viewing, etc.)  However, I probably wouldn't recommend Vault Pro if your need is *only* file replication.

For the very budget conscious you could even implement Windows DFS, but again, assumption being that you only want File replication.  Panzura is better, but more costly although certainly more efficient at keeping remote sites updated.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the input. These are hard metrics to value.

[Anonymous]

Excellent points. Vault Pro is a pretty extensive program. The list of features may help identify the value in the switch. We would like to do more than just replication, but I need everyone to drink the "koolaid" first.