October 23, 2023

Autodesk Vault Professional and Solidworks

Aldred Boyd | Application Engineer - Technical

Autodesk Vault Professional is a great PDM package which will manage your Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD files with absolute ease but what about other software CAD vendors like Solidworks? Autodesk has an add-in for that. In fact Autodesk has add-ins for the Vault Professional software for Solidworks, PTC Creo and Microstation software.

With Solidworks you will need to download 2 different files from the Autodesk Appstore. The one will be installed on the server and the other on the client side. This will notify the system that Solidworks CAD is part of the system and it needs to look out for some Solidworks CAD specific entities or features like configurations

When setting up the system as with Inventor you will need to setup the working folder. This tells Vault where to send the files to your local drive. That is exactly the same as the Inventor install and setup. Because we are not working specifically with an Inventor project file, we will need a way to get the files into the Vault from wherever you have saved them. This can be done by uploading the assembly/drawing from within Solidworks. You will probably experience some errors here because of Autodesk Vault’s strict policies about not having unresolved files. This can be overcome by an option in Solidworks Vault add-in which will allow you to upload to Vault with having files missing but please be very careful regarding this as it could have a knock on effect downstream with other files being reliant on those missing or ignored files.

Once the files are in Vault you can happily check in and check out with the Solidworks plugin and within the Vault client you are able to manage the files as per normal with lifecycles, change orders as well as your BOM’s with Items.

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About the Author

Aldred Boyd | Application Engineer - Technical

Aldred is an Application Engineer with over 22 years of experience working with Autodesk products. His primary focus is in a consultative role for the manufacturing industry, where he identifies potential challenges within a company's workflow and processes. His extensive experience enables him to identify these challenges and resolve them through the addition of software, training, or further development to address the issues encountered.