Lite VaultExplorer: browser Vault for the rest of the company

August 28, 2026 · PDM Product

Companies invest in Autodesk Vault to bring engineering data under control: tracked revisions, approval workflows, a single source of truth for drawings and BOMs. Then, in practice, only the five people in the engineering office actually use it. Everyone else — production, procurement, quality, sales — ends up asking for PDFs by email every time they need a drawing.

The reason is simple: the standard Vault client was built for people who draw. Too many features, too many technical windows, a learning curve that isn't worth climbing just to consult a layout once a day. The well-known outcome: parallel archives on shared drives or SharePoint, files emailed around that go stale the next day, production decisions made on outdated revisions.

A light browser, the same policies

Lite VaultExplorer was built exactly for this: giving Vault access to people who need to consult data without becoming CAD users. A simple native Windows interface, built-in previews for PDF, Office and CAD files (via Autodesk DWF™), search even inside file contents, bookmarks for frequently used documents.

The part that matters for whoever manages the Vault: no compromises on security. Server policies — permissions, visibility, groups — apply exactly as they do in the standard client. If someone can't see a file in the technical client, they won't see it here either. And compatibility covers every Vault release from 2021 to 2026, across all three editions (Basic, Workgroup, Professional).