About importing documents to a vault

There are three methods for importing documents to a vault:

• Drag and drop in the Meridian client applications as described in the BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise User’s Guide

Note    Because this action will create a new revision and the document must be in a released state, this command must be customized to place the document in the correct state of a workflow according to your organization’s business process for this action. You can do this in the DocGenericEvent_BeforeReplaceContent event as described in BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise VBScript API Reference. If the command is not customized, an Access is denied error will result and the action will fail.

• With the Document Import Tool as described in the BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise User’s Guide
• With the Database Import Wizard in the Configurator

The Database Import Wizard is described in the following topics.

The Database Import Wizard is a powerful way to import large numbers of documents into a vault more conveniently than with drag and drop. It works like the Document Import Tool available to users in PowerUser, but the Database Import Wizard is slightly more powerful.

With the Database Import Wizard, you can:

• Import any number of documents from various locations using a single data file
• Import property data from standard ODBC-compatible data files
• Let the import run unattended while you do other things
• Import multiple hybrid document files into a single hybrid document
• Import renditions to be attached to native content
• Import data from CAD drawing title blocks
• Import entire assemblies or subassemblies while maintaining references
• Populate the properties of imported documents from the data file or with fixed values
• Import multiple revisions as a single document in a vault
• Save different combinations of import options as templates for reuse later
• Monitor import progress and statistics

Configuring these options correctly takes a little time, but the settings can be saved to configuration files and reused for similar import projects.

Before you begin to import documents, we recommend that you read and understand all of the topics in this section completely. Then analyze and document your organization’s requirements for each of the above items. This plan will help you to complete the Database Import Wizard with minimal effort. The quality of the import results will be only as good as the quality of the data you import. Import mistakes are much easier to avoid than they are to correct.

Configuring and running the Database Import Wizard is described in the following topics.