Hagerman Blog

I discuss data management and business processes with companies every day, and most organizations struggle with what should be a simple process.  Once a design is completed or revised, how do you communicate new and updated information to the rest of the business?  Often companies rely on manual processes that are time-consuming and prone to error.  For those companies that use Autodesk Vault to manage their CAD data, it doesn't have to be this way.

A few months ago my colleague Mike Space wrote about powerVault – a native PowerShell extension produced by coolOrange that can dramatically simplify interaction with the Vault API.  Today I’d like to build upon that idea by illustrating how using powerVault in conjunction with the Vault Data Standard can provide a complete solution for customizing Vault behavior.

There’s a neat ‘trick’ you can perform using Vault Data Standard (VDS) and iLogic that involves creating Engineer-To-Order (ETO)-type components.  If you have a semi-standard product line that changes based on customer spec you can use VDS to help create new iterations of those components, and even off-load the creation of those components to non-CAD users.