Our company is moving us to Solid Works...

[Anonymous]

So I know this sounds stupid, but our "mother" company has decided to move our company from our 10+ year history and working files to Solid Works. Currently our Vault have around 5,000 parts, assemblies and drawings, 95% of which are in a released state. I've been asked to create a copy of our Vault to add to a network drive or SSD drive, so that they can access the parts to open in SW's. I made them aware that simply opening parts in SW doesn't solve their issue with being able to edit or revise existing legacy data. I fortunately own my own copy of Product Design Suite so I can continue working on these files, but once they drop the subscription, we'd lose access to the Vault, so I am at least trying to get the parts to a drive I can access and have the parts usable.

I know I can just a massive dump of the Vault to my local workspace, but having parts that metadata's as "released" or "Checked-In" will require me to (save a copy as) if I make any changes... does anyone know of a way to get everything from the Vault, and convert it to as if it had never been Vaulted in the first place?

[swalton]

As I understand it, Vault Workgroup/Pro does not store the Lifecycle State in the CAD files.  Inventor won't know what files are Released vs WIP vs Obsolete.  Instead that data is stored in the various Vault databases. 

Vault controls file edit permission with the Windows Read-Only flag.  You can always Get all the CAD data and use Windows Explorer to change the flag to allow editing.

You might be able to write some iLogic that runs in Inventor, reads the Vault Lifecycle State, and stores it in a custom iProperty for each file.  You may be able to edit the security on the Released state to allow edits during the transition.

Do you plan to move to PDMWorks or whatever the Solidworks Vault competitor is?  If so, have the Solidworks reseller quote migrating data from your existing Vault.  You might be able to capture all the design history that way.

[k_onghena]

Hello,

I come from a solidworks background and still use SW more than Inventor, however Autodesk Vault works really, really well with Solidworks. In my experience Solidworks PDM kept on screwing up the Windows Explorer. Try to keep Vault as your PDM solution, it is far better dan the alternative from Solidworks. Can't judge the cloud platform though.  Migrating is always a costly endeavour, it would amaze me if the SW resellers would take time and effort to retrieve the file history.