AUTO DESK VAULT
Autodesk Vault is a data management tool integrated with Autodesk Inventor Series, Autodesk Inventor Professional, AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical, and Civil 3D products. It helps design teams track work in progress and maintain version control in multi-user environments. It allows them to organize and reuse designs by consolidating product information and reducing the need to re-create designs from scratch. Users can store and search both CAD data (such as Autodesk Inventor, DWG, and DWF files) and non-CAD documents (such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel files).
The Vault environment functions as a client server application with the central SQL database and Autodesk Data Management Server (ADMS) applications installed on a Windows based server with client access granted via the Vault Explorer application. ADMS acts as the middleware that handles client transactions with the SQL database. Vault Explorer functions as the client application and is intended to run alongside the companion CAD software. The Vault Explorer UI (User Interface) is intended to have an appearance similar to Microsoft Outlook and can display the Vault folder structure, file metadata in the form of a grid and a preview pane for more detailed information. The essential nature of Vault is as file versioning system that "records" the progression of all edits a file has undergone. All files and their associated metadata are indexed in the SQL base data management system and are searchable from the Vault client interface.