Last week I spent a couple days starting to learn the ins and outs of Vault Collaboration 2012 and it’s integration with the AEC products for 2012. This is the first iteration of Vault being integrated with the AEC products, so this is definitely a work in progress. At this point, here’s how Vault works with the Revit family of products for 2012…
- Archival of Central files – This process doesn’t need to happen every time you sync to central, this really only needs to happen when you want to save a copy of the central for archival purposes. There are options that you can enable so that when you sync to central, Vault will make a detached copy inside Vault. This is essentially taking the place of a manual Detach and Save-as when you need to archive a central file.
- Family Management – This is something I can see being very handy for many firms, but I think it still needs some work. The concept here is that a “content manager” can set families to different statuses, thus allowing the end users to only see content that is say set to “Approved”. So while families are being worked on and aren’t ready for prime-time, users won’t see them in Vault. There is a search function that allows users to search for families based on many different things, which is nice. But at this point, there isn’t the ability to search for parameters that already exist in the families themselves…this is where the improvement needs to come in. Sure, you can tag a family inside of Vault with properties, but the ability to search the parameters would be a great addition. (Just like SmartBIM currently does)
Overall, I think the biggest benefit of Vault for Revit at this point would be the Family integration…but we’ll see where Vault goes in the future. As I get more time to work with Vault and really get to dig into some work-flow pieces, I’ll definitely be posting more about this subject.
