Autodesk Vault Professional 2021 released

Autodesk Vault Professional 2021 is here and there is a host of new administrator and user features added. The latest release continues Autodesk’s pursuit of comprehensive, flexible, and seamless product data management of your CAD data and in comparison with last year’s improvements, this year’s seems far more impressive and game-changing.

This is as a result of both continued innovation by Autodesk and customer requests and feedback from their idea station platform. Here is a rundown of key areas of improvement:

Productivity features

Inventor and Revit interoperability

Improved routing and lifecycle management

Smart duplication reduction

Build integration – Navisworks

Faster search algorithm and new filter options

Administration features

Administrator enhancements within the security model

Improved communication controls

UI interface improvements

Enhanced purge control functions

So now that we have an overview of these new features, let’s take a look at them in-depth.

Vault Users – Productivity features

New property to identify orphaned files

In the advanced search filters, there is a new property that helps find “orphaned” files.  The “Has parent” property is true for files that are used in designs and is false for files no longer linked to any assembly.

Ability to apply purge control to historical data

In previous versions, lifecycle changes only affected NEW data. There is now an option in Lifecycle definitions dialogue box that allows you to change this for existing file versions.

Smart Duplicate Reduction in Vault 2021 

The new Duplicate Search  feature enables you to easily run a 3D geometric search for parts, so you don’t waste time and effort documenting, releasing, and managing duplicates. This feature is a huge new benefit for users. The feature uses a geometric search algorithm to detect similar parts, giving you real-time feedback on designs that may already exist in the vault, thus saving cost of redesigning, time in redesigning and prevents redundant work and the possibility of errors that come with a remanufacture of a duplicate part.

The Smart Duplicate Dashboard provides analytics and statistics of repeated files based on the configured folders in your Vault, so it is possible to exclude content centre or library files where you expect similar parts to exist.

Direct integration with Inventor also helps search in the modelling workspace to clean up the existing design from duplicate parts during the review/release process and before check-in of external parts.

For example, if you’re an Inventor user and frustrated with data duplication issues in your company, imagine the value of running a search on a part that doesn’t rely on a part number or part name. Duplicate Search uses geometry to show you all the duplicate parts in your Vault. Reuse the correct part – delete duplicates – save time and design your products quicker.

Communications for Engineering Change Orders 

To improve communications when progressing through an Engineering Change Order, support has been added to edit the automatically generated email template for ECOs. 

Higher job queue maximum display number  

You can now set the number of jobs displayed in the Job Queue using a new option in the Integrations tab of the Global Settings dialog box. When jobs are submitted to the Job Processor’s Job Queue, previously only the first 1000 jobs were displayed. In Vault 2021, an administrator can configure the Job Queue’ maximum display number from 1000 to 100000. 

Administrator Controls

More granularity for user settings to increase collaboration  

One of the most valuable new capabilities in Vault 2021 is more granularity for user settings to improve internal and external collaboration. Object-based and lifecycle state-based security and Custom Roles now include download permission.  

Copy Design  

For Copy Design in Vault 2021 Workgroup and Professional, rulesets are now stored on the server. This makes it possible for administrators to manage Copy Design rulesets globally and provide standard settings for Copy Design behavior.  

Additionally, new functionality in Copy Design makes it possible to copy property values from the original file to any user-defined property in the new file. For example, the original part number, or source drawing file. 

Inventor and Revit interoperability

For Vault and Inventor users that work on Civil and construction projects, there is often a need to model and document designs based on Revit or Navisworks files. Vault 2021 now allows these types of files to integrate with Inventor and check in only the relevant Inventor parts while linking the referenced Revit files from your local network drive or BIM 360 Docs.

These are just some of the new features added to Vault 2021 family of products. In my opinion, these are monumentus changes and will definitely improve productivity regardless of the level of integration you have with Vault at your site. The migration process is as per usual and upgrading sooner rather than later will give you an edge and possible prevent stagnation and problems that are currently veing experienced by your CAD users, administrators and processors of data in the Vault.

For more information on these and other exciting features in Vault 2021, consult the official Autodesk help page.