Collaborate with Clients, Supply Chain & More using Shared Views

David Ponka

If you have updated Vault Workgroup or Vault Professional 2018 with the 2018.1 subscription update this year then you’ve likely noticed a big change in Vault; The new Shared Views panel. This new feature is the gateway to easy collaboration with anyone who might have input regarding your designs. If you need to work with your manufacturers or customers on a potential design, and you are using Vault to host your CAD data, this is for you.

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The shared views tool allows Vault users to publish 2D and 3D design views to the cloud where you and the recipient(s) can share, view, markup, comment and print a shared design. Views are not your native CAD files so your design work is protected and they are automatically removed after 30 days unless you delete them first or extend the sharing period.

To create a shared view, the author needs Vault (Workgroup or Professional) and an Autodesk ID. The invited viewers/collaborators need only the link to the shared view and an internet connected web browser. This makes collaboration extremely easy since the recipient of a shared view doesn’t need any paid software, or even free applications like Design Review, to view and markup a shared view from Vault. Let’s take a closer look.

Publish a View

To share a view of a file with someone; find the file in your Vault client application and select Share View from the right-click menu. Vault will prompt you to log in to your Autodesk account, if you aren’t already logged in, and then ask you to enter the name of the view being created.

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Pressing the Share button from Vault will then process the file, create a visualization, and send it to Autodesk’s online servers.

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A final dialog box appears with links that allow you to go directly to the shared view online or copy the view’s hyperlink for sharing via email or another method. You can either select one of the links shown or close the pop-up and use your shared views panel in Vault to access further options.

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View & Share

Now that the view of your drawing or model has been published you can see any comment or markup activity in the shared views panel in Vault, where all your shared views are managed. To work with a view just click the button to view, share, delete or extend the share period.

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Collaborate

Once a shared view is created, comments and markups etc. are done from a web browser. Even the author of a view uses a web browser to collaborate using already shared views. The panel in Vault becomes the view management and notification tool to indicate when new actions have occurred.

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Try the links here to see the assembly I've shared, using the web viewer:

Assembly: http://autode.sk/2tDJSMX

Drawing: http://autode.sk/2p19e1F

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If you've been looking for a better way to collaborate on designs with your suppliers, with your customers, or even internally, then shared views might be the answer. While there have been ways to share design views for a long time, using neutral file formats like PDFs, DWFs and even email, none have been quite as easy to use or adopt as just loading a web page.

-DAP

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