Vault Cloud Sync with BIM360 Docs

With the release of Vault 2019 they introduced a new feature to allow you to Collaborate your data hosted in your on premise Vault with the off premise BIM360 platform.

Read All About Vault Cloud Sync Here

So essentially inside of Vault you might have lots of different Projects and under each project you would have a series of files and folders (Sub Folders and Files etc).

Now certain files and folders you might want to share to BIM360 Docs for others to consume. Obviously sharing the data with BIM360 Docs means you can share files with people in a much easier way, especially people that are not inside your firewall and obviously have a tonne of tools inside BIM360 Docs to review and collaboration (Here is an Article on Docs and here is another).

Now you don’t necessarily want to share every file and every folder. So as you create the project (or later) you first need to config the Cloud Mapping to support this workflow.

Let’s have a look at this process.

In my current Vault, being very simple for demonstration purposes, I only have 1 project with a series of folders underneath it.

With a bunch of files under each folder.

So to make this work we need to Configure the Cloud mappings, to do this we then need to go into the Tools Menu -> Administration -> Vault Settings

Then choose the configure Cloud Mappings via Collaborate Tab (as shown above)

Press New button to create a new Mapping.

Then we first give it a name (PURPLE), then select the Vault Folder (RED) - being the parent folder for all could synced folders. It could also be said the project folder.

You then also need to specify the Cloud Location to which the files get synced to (BLUE).

Once you have selected the Cloud Drive Folder to sync your project files to, you still need to tell the system which folders from you project that you want to sync to the cloud.

Obviously, some data will be sensitive to the internal users of Vault (meaning on premise users of Vault, which will have data that is not wanting to be synced to BIM360 Docs) and other data that will be published, being published data by definition (i.e. For Construction Documents) or files that are ready for public consumption by say the construction team.

The second point to consider is that the data can travel in both directions, but we will cover that shortly (i.e. People can submit data to the BIM360 Docs Folder/Sub Folder and have it be pulled back into Vault)

In My Example I have created 2 Scheduled Folders to sync.

Schedule Tab

Using the green plus + button I added a folder and then on the right-hand side I set the “Schedule” (frequency) of when to sync.

There are three options:

1. Daily – Every Day at a specific time.
2. Every – Set to X number of hours with 8, 12 and 16 being the options available.
3. None – Meaning you will manually sync the files when you require.

At the same token I can use the red X to delete a Folder/Path/Selection.

General Tab

In the General tab you also need to consider 2 other options.

Firstly, what the “Action” will be:

• Upload to the cloud drive – Push the data up
• Download from the cloud drive – Pull the data down
• Bi-directional – Push and pull

The second option, is do you want to do this action for all sub folders within the specified folder that you have set.

Filter Tab

There is Filtering options on the third tab where we can filter files based on certain properties of the file like the Status etc.

With these three options the user can be quiet selective in what gets pushed / pulled between the cloud and Vault.

Now once the scheduled event occurs you end up with a Job in the Job Processor for each Folder that you want to sync.

To see what happens below I have a screen shot of what I currently have in my BIM360 Docs folder. As you can see it is empty:

I you scroll up you will see the same folder I specified in another image (Vault Folder).

When a job gets kicked off you get one of 5 different types based on the “Action” chosen.

Reference to this can be found Here!

In the meantime, I have had my two jobs kick off. (Because I had 2 folders that I was syncing)

The Job Processor will process these jobs for me one at a time. Note: Make sure you are logged into your Desktop Connector. If you are not logged in it will not work. The job will fail.

If you are logged in the Job Processor will show one if those 5 job types, for example:

Then after a short time, depending on the number of files and the amount of data we end up syncing:

The very important point here is that these folders can be permission controlled and each team of people attached to each folder will only see the folders they have permission to.

Manual Sync

A secondary feature of this, is once you have the Cloud Mappings in place you can manually trigger the sync at any time.

This can be done via Highlighting the files (not folders) and choosing the “Upload to Cloud Drive” and Vault honors the folder it is located in in Vault and creates a new Job for the manual upload to file to the respective folder in BIM360 Docs.

Enjoy!