What's New in Vault 2023: For Authors, Administrators, and Participants

SENTHIL KUMAR: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Autodesk University 2022. This is class IM501061 where we are going to talk about What's New in Vault 2023 for Authors, Administrators, and Participants.

My name is Senthil Kumar, and I have with me the co-presenter and colleague Irvin Hayes. I'm a software development and manager for the data management group at Autodesk in Singapore. I'm with Autodesk for the last 17 plus years.

In Autodesk, I worked as a product support engineer, QA engineer, QA manager, product owner, product manager before becoming a development manager. And prior to joining to Autodesk, I worked for Autodesk Distributor, PTC, and Delcam. Irvin, can you please introduce yourself?

IRVIN HAYES: Yes, hello, everyone. My name is Irvin Hayes, Jr. I am a senior product manager here at Autodesk on the Vault product line. I am based out of Atlanta, Georgia. I've worked here at Autodesk for 17 years, and my current job responsibilities, obviously, is to help our customers, our partners, and consulting teams to deploy Vault in enterprise environments and help them where they're having any other types of issues. Thank you, Senthil.

SENTHIL KUMAR: Thank you, Irvin. Right, this class will help you to understand the new features that we have implemented in the latest Vault 2023 release. And we can find out how they help you to focus on your work, easily connect remote users to Vault data, and how can we increase the collaboration within more workflows.

And here are the learning objectives. Learn how you can improve the data experience inside AutoCAD, learn how you can use Vault items to support Inventor's instance properties, learn how you can securely connect remote users to Vault server without the need of VPN, and learn how you can provide feedback with enhanced markup functionality.

With the Vault 2023 release, we continue to deliver a modern, connected, and insightful user experience. How did we do that? With this release, we based the features on user personas and roles within the company. We made sure each role got right setup capabilities and best technology to access those capabilities.

And here is the first persona, author. For authors, we have delivered a better integrated data experience while remaining inside CAD application like AutoCAD. We have also developed additional support for Inventor's instance properties. And also, we have enhanced the user interface for Vault.

Working with the distributed teams is challenging for administrators. So we have added a new feature to make it easier to connect remote users to Vault data behind the firewall without the need of a VPN using the new functionality called Vault gateway.

Now, participants have better ways to provide feedback and also ask important questions of their design engineers using the new mock-up functionality. Let's take a deeper look into these personas and see what we have implemented in Vault 2023.

Let's start with authors. Inventor introduced this instance property support in the last release. When they released we couldn't support inside Vault, so with Vault 2023 release we are supporting Inventor's instance properties. This is nothing, but you will see the instance properties in the bill of materials table.

So whatever you see from Inventor's build out material, you will see them in Vault's build out material. If there is no instance properties exist, then the bottom box at the same as the previous release. Let's take a look into a small video.

So here we have this property. We have this item. You can see that it is grouped, right? And it's showing in a single row, right? Let's go back to Inventor and add instance properties so that it appears in three different rows. You can see the same happens in item in Vault client. So that's how it works.

So you map the instance properties to the bottom row property inside Vault client, and then you will see those instance properties in the Vault items.

We introduced this Show Details dialogue in Inventor last release. When we introduce the request from customers was, can we have the same functionality inside AutoCAD? We listened to them, so we are providing Show Details functionality inside AutoCAD.

So this way, you do not need to switch back between AutoCAD and Vault client for looking into users tab or various tab, or even to look into your change order information or bill of material information. You can start assigning items directly from AutoCAD.

And we also added a go to Vault folder command. So this was, again, a gap between the Inventor adding and AutoCAD adding. So we added that command. As I said, we are also adding the Copy Design command so that you can do the Copy Design within AutoCAD.

The next announcement that we did is with respect to the user interface, right? We completely revamped the Vault user interface, and we added two new themes. One is the dark theme and the other one is the light theme, right?

And this theme can be switched using the Vault options. So this way users will have a consistent and cohesive visual experience when they are using the desktop client or the Thin Client or the mobile client, right?

And while doing this theming, we also took the opportunity to refresh the icons inside the Vault client. The new icons are simple, modern, and have better color accessibility for all the users.

The next one is column customization, right? This customizing the column was possible only few dialogs. So the customers were requesting in the idea station, can we expand this functionality to rest of the dialogues? So we listened to them.

So now, columns can be customized in change state, change revision, change category, pack and go, synchronize properties, undo checkout in almost all the dialogues. So this way it helps the customers to view the data in a right way.

All right, so whatever we have seen now was released during the RTM time frame, right? We recently released, last month we released a .1 update for 2023. And let's look into what other functionalities that has been went into this update for others.

Again, we did improvements in AutoCAD and Inventor add-ins. So the first one is loading and unloading that data standard, right? So we had a enable, disable command in Inventor for the data standard, but we removed it because of some technical issues. But the customers were asking, can we have that back?

So we are introducing a new way of enabling, disabling by loading and unloading the adding of a data standard, right? The next one is with respect to Show Details.

Let's say if you are adding some data or if you are assigning or updating a data, it's not getting refreshed in Show Details because the Refresh button was missing. So we are adding the Refresh button both inside inventory as well as AutoCAD. So that way you can easily refresh the content.

The last one is update item command. So we have a same item command, but update item was missing. So we are adding an update item command for the bill of materials tab.

Copy design improvements, there are a couple of copy design improvements went in 2023.1, and the first one is, while executing the copy operation, if there are any files with restrictions, a warning dialogs gets displayed with the list of restricted files, all right?

And all the files with the restrictions are highlighted in red color. And when you close this dialog, so you wanting dialog, you will see that. You can also export those restricted file lists into an external file, which can be saved as an Excel file or a text file or HTML file so that it can be easily referenced later, all right?

The last functionality that we added in the Copy Design is the ability to copy and paste a list of editable values when you are in the numbering panel, right? So you have a prefix and suffix, and you want it to multi copy multiple rows of information, copy them and then paste it into Excel, edit them, and then copy back to the numbering panel. So that's possible now.

We also enhanced and also added a few properties with the 2023.1. The enhanced property is the property "has drawing," right? So we have this "has drawing" property in the last release. But this was not helping when we apply the lifecycle stage for both the design and drawing files, right?

So you cannot have the same definition of a lifecycle for both the design and drawing files. This property becomes true, and it's going to fail during the lifecycle. So what we did is we changed the property as "has drawing." Also it can be considered as is drawing.

So you will see the "has drawing" property as a true value for the design files as well as for the drawing files. So you can see that from this image the "has drawing" is true for the IAM, also for IDW and DWG, right?

The next property that we added is has markup. We will be talking about the markup capabilities later. When we released this markup capability in RTM, we never had a way to identify whether this file has a markup or not. So with the .1 release, we added these two properties, "has markup" and "has markup historical." That way, it's easy to identify whether the design file has a markup or not.

We talked about the user enhancement or the user interface enhancement. So when we released during the RTM time frame, we were supporting this theme only in the Vault Professional. But with the .1 update, the theme can be applied for Vault Basic as well as Vault Workgroup. And the option is available similar way in the Options for both Basic as well as Workgroup.

The next command that we introduced with .1 is Open Drawing command. Remember, we have this Open Drawing command inside Inventor. Customers were asking, can we have that same command in the Vault client also? So we added this Open Drawing command in the Context menu.

So when you select a design file and if it has a drawing, so this command will be enabled. And if you have a single drawing, it's automatically gets open. But if you have a multiple drawings associated with the design files, you will have this dialog where you have to choose which one you want it to open.

Here you can see the scissors IAM has a DWG as well as IDW. So that's why you have this dialog, and you have to choose which one you want it to open. And right now, this command is supported only for Inventor as well as SolidWorks files.

Now, Irvin, will cover the administrator portion. Irvin?

IRVIN HAYES: Thank you, Senthil. So here, covering what we've done in our 2023 release for our administrators, one of them is the design file restrictions. In Vault, the enforced restrictions for check in of design files feature prohibits users from checking in design files using that Drag and Drop and the Add files command in the Vault client.

The design file types were hard-coded making it restriction challenging to enforce because some file extensions may not be considered design files. So in the Vault 2023 release administrators can define the list of files that can or cannot be checked in when this restriction is enabled. Also, administrators can add file extensions to the user-defined properties or user-defined list for more flexibility.

So now, our administrators can make some flexible changes here. But also keep in mind that there are some default system file extensions that are in there, but they cannot remove those. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide.

Lifecycle state colors. Currently, users have a difficulty recognizing the states of files in a large file grid. So in Vault 2023, we introduced color customizations for the lifecycle states inside of the lifecycle definitions.

Administrators can customize each state of a file lifecycle definition to have a unique color. Setting a color on each state enables users to scan through a file list and quickly identify the files in a particular lifecycle state. Go to the next one. Next slide, Cynth-- thank you.

Vault Gateway. Collaborating with Vault users is an everyday reality for us. As a result, users need access to Vaulted data no matter where they're located. Today, users must use VPN to access essential data behind the firewall. VPN software causes a lot of management overhead for administrators and can slow down the access to data, and performance decreases and it also decreases the user's productivity.

When collaborating with third parties, administrators have to issue users active directory accounts and VPN access, which adds management overhead and costs. So in 2023, we implemented the Vault Gateway feature to overcome some of these issues.

Vault Gateway provides a secure connection between the remote user and the Vault server behind the firewall. This secure connection removes the administrator's need to provide active directory accounts and VPN access to third party collaborators.

This is intended to make this collaboration easier and allow those users who are remote, whether that be at home or on site or at a customer location and a customer meeting. They can all gain access to that Vaulted data behind the firewall with less administration overhead. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide.

Vault Basic is an entitlement to these specific products, and they're Professional 3D Studio Max, AutoCAD with Specialized Tools, our product design and manufacturing collection, our AEC collection, and the media and entertainment collection.

Users will need to have an entitlement or subscription to the products that have the Vault Basic entitlement in order to use Vault Basic. When we do check the entitlement, we will verify that this user ID has that ability to access it. If not, then that user will not be able to use Vault Basic. Let's go ahead and go to the next.

So as before, Senthil mentioned in 2023.1 we did some more updates as well. So let's go ahead to the next one here.

As you know, the Job Processor right now, if you a job fails, the job still stays or remains in the queue. But it's up to an administrator to resubmit that job. Now, in this update, what we've done is allow the administrator to set a retry option for jobs that may have failed for whatever reason.

So the retry option can be set anywhere between 1 and 10. And what will happen is, if a job fails, it'll automatically be resubmitted in the queue based on the number of retries. If it still fails after the maximum number of retries, then it will remain in the queue for the administrator to take a look at and see if they can resolve the problem. Let's going to the next slide.

SENTHIL KUMAR: Thank you, Irvin. All right, let's look into what are the enhancements that we have done for participants.

We have a markup facility for ECO files, ECO process. When you have a ECO, if you have a DWF file, you can create markup. But with the 2023 release, we are introducing a new way of doing the markup. This markup can be applied in the file level or in item level or in ECO level, right?

And you have this markup browsing panel where you can filter markup based on who created the markup and the creation date. You can view, you can rename, you can delete the markup through the panel. And you can also collapse and expand the panel window, right?

When you create the markup, you can save the markup in two different ways. Either you save that as a data, which can be saved inside the Vault along with your design file. Or the markup can be saved as an image file that can be shared outside through email or some other way, right?

And you can also view this markup in the Vault Thin Client, right? Vault Thin Client has the ability to view the markup. You can also create the markup in the Thin Client, but in Thin Client you can save the markup only as an image file. Since Thin Client is in a read-only mode, you cannot say the markup as a data that can be saved inside Vault.

So let's take a quick look on how this is being implemented, right? So here we are creating a markup in the view window, right? So we add the markup information. And then save, so you can have that data. So we save as a data with a command. So you can see that markup is added in the markup panel, right?

Now, if you go to change order, create a new change order. I can save this. OK now, go back to the Thin Client. Go to history, and then you can go to the specific revision. And then you can see those markups.

So this way it's easy for the participants to view the markup, and then if they wanted to comment so they can create a markup in the Thin Client using that image format, all right?

So the next enhancement is using Inventor read-only mode for viewing Inventor files. By default, we have two ways to view the Inventor files, either Inventor view, or Inventor read-only mode. These two options work based on whether the design file has a DWF or if there is no DWF, right?

But the customer request was, whether the design file has a DWF or not, we wanted to always use the Inventor read-only to view the files. So that's where we added this a third option called always use Inventor read-only mode. That way, whether the DWF is there are not there, when you select the files to view in window, the file gets opened up always in Inventor read-only.

All right, so what are the new things that is gone into 2023.1 update for participants? There are few enhancements that are made for markup. The first one is, let's say you are creating a markup. And then, if you are trying to exit without saving, a warning message is added, right? And the warning message will give options to whether you want to save the markup or you want to discard the markup, right?

The next one is, when you view the markup panel or the markup toolbar, it was difficult to find out whether this particular file has a markup or not. So we added a badge icon, right? So that gives you-- if the file has a markup, it gives you the number of markups in that file.

So this way it's easy. You can find out, if it is zero, then the file doesn't have a markup. And if it has a number, that means the file has a markup. It's easy for the users to find out whether the file has a markup or not. This is on top of the property that we introduce as markup property.

And the next one that we did is sometimes customers are using different background for their drawing, mainly for Inventor drawings, right? And since the Thin Client is going to print what you are seeing in the screen, that's what is going to be printed. So when you print, even the background color is getting printed.

So they asked us to remove-- can we remove the background color? So with the .1 update, the drawing background color is removed and no longer present when you are printing the drawing.

There are a few other enhancements that's gone into Thin Client. Now, we have a new filter for change order workspace. With that, the filters is going to talk about whether it lists all the ECOs which are in open state or rest of the states, all the states, like work or check out review or approve. So you have this two option, whether you want to view only the open state ECOs or you want to view all state ECOs, all right?

The next one is for nondesign files, if the file extension is supported in the browser, you can open the file in the browser itself. For example, you have a PDF file, right? You have an image file. You want to view the PDF and image files directly in the browser instead of the Autodesk viewer in the Thin Client, right?

So we have the option to view those files directly in the browser, all right? And the next one is when you view the BOM information, BOM data in the Thin Client, and you want to extract those information into a spreadsheet. So we have provided an ability to copy all those bill of materials data. And then you can paste that into an Excel file, all right?

The next one is update visualization command. So this command is already available in the right click, the context menu. But data users are asking, can we have that in the top action bar so that it's easy for us to invoke that command? So we are adding this update visualization command in the action bar.

And the last one is, when you are logging, you have to keep inputting the username always. So we didn't have the ability to cache that username. So with the .1 update, the username gets cached in the browser so that next time when you try to log in, you don't need to retype the username.

That's the end of our presentation on Vault 2023 What's New. Thank you very much.