You are viewing limited content. For full access, please sign in.

Question

Question

2 systems viewed through LF possible?

asked on February 22, 2016

We have two systems for documentation:

1)  LF for accounting, HR, purchasing, shipping, receving departments

2)  Autodesk Vault for engineering department

 

I have a request from the guy that is over purchasing, shipping & receiving that 'if' he gets me the LF SDK would I be able to make LF pull the files from Vault and be viewable through LF so that he would not have to flip back and forth between programs when he needs to look at stuff in Vault.  I am not sure that LF would act as a "viewer" for another program.  Wouldn't those files have to be stored in LF to be viewed in LF?  Please advise if this is doable.  Thanks!

0 0

Replies

replied on February 22, 2016

It looks like Vault is a kind of document management system itself.  You could move those documents out of Vault and manage them in Laserfiche, but that doesn't sound like what you want.  You don't really want them both places, since then you don't have an authoritative version.

The Laserfiche clients only have built-in support for image documents and PDFs.  Every other document type needs a viewer application to be installed on the machine.

0 0
replied on March 1, 2016 Show version history

Yes Vault is a document management system for Autodesk products, but we keep sales orders and things like that under the job number in that system.  Essentially, a sales order for instance is an excel spreadsheet or pdf - my user wants me to make it where he can see the file structure of Vault and files through LF, keeping Vault as the authoritative version of the document but being able to pull it up and view it through LF.

 

P.S.  Sorry for late reply - I had to go off work for a week unexpectedly. 

0 0
replied on March 1, 2016

The Laserfiche clients will only show you content from your Laserfiche repository.  I could imagine some kind of custom application that knows how to pull content from both systems, but that would be a big job.  If Vault has the right integration points you might be able to have a button in Laserfiche that opens Vault up to a particular folder or document, but that also assumes that there is some related material in Laserfiche and that the inconvenience is about navigating in two systems.  Do your users just not like the Vault system?  There's not much we can do about that.

0 0
replied on March 1, 2016

It sounds like what you are needing is something similar to Affinity or LF Connector. It would need to be configured off of a screen that probably shows the metadata of the document in question and could then pull up documents in the other system. You can also launch applications using LF Connector if I remember correctly.

It doesn't give them exactly what they are asking for, but it is probably the next best thing. Both products mentioned above have free test versions so you could make sure they work before you buy them.

0 0
replied on March 1, 2016

Brian - That's what I was thinking - that I would need to create an in-house app to look at both systems - like you said, big job!  But with the LF and Vault SDK's, this would be doable, correct?

 

Blake - Thanks for the suggestions, I might try the LF Connector as I was thinking of making that a suggestion as one of our next implementations anyway.

 

Thank you both for your responses - very much appreciated!!

0 0
replied on March 1, 2016

It's definitely doable in theory, and the size of the job depends on how much functionality you need.  Someone familiar with .Net GUI programming and the LF SDK could get a bare-bones application running within a few days, but you would have to re-implement every client feature that your users expect.  And if what your users really like is the document viewer in Laserfiche, that's really quite a bit of work to match.

What are the possibilities for migrating the content in Vault into Laserfiche?  Is Laserfiche missing functionality that Vault provides?

0 0
replied on March 1, 2016

Migrating content possibility = zilch.  Vault handles our Autocad stuff which is 3d drawings and stuff like that.  As far as I know, LF will not view these drawings as we have to have the viewer on the machines themselves to view them.  Our engineering department recently looked at moving over to LF and decided against it. 

However, like I said, we keep a lot of "non-drawing" type stuff in Vault as well as we just recently (less than a year) implemented LF.  We only implemented LF in our HR, Purchasing, Shipping and Accounting departments though, not the Sales or Engineering and at last meeting, that was not going to happen anytime soon.  But the non-drawing type stuff is what my user would want access to through LF.

0 0
You are not allowed to follow up in this post.

Sign in to reply to this post.