Ed NOTE: After a birdie told me this might not work as advertised, Autodesk was contacted to determine exactly what does work. It turns out that during development Civil 3D was setup to allow this but ADMS does not and it was decided to keep the function there.  My contact was just as intrigued as you are right now. Bottomline – this is a tease of things to come. Not a “deal breaker” as the dirdie would say…

Just wanted let everyone know (in IT that is) supporting Vault and ADMS has gotten easier with 2009.  You can now utilize your Active Directory (AD) Users and Groups for Vault.  Users and groups can then be managed using Windows permissions.

Domain users & user group accounts can be imported into ADMS. ADMS cannot manage these, it is simply reading the AD.  So, you can promote ADMS accounts to AD and demote AD accounts to ADMS. The promotion/demotion may or may not be useful to you.  Simply create 2 new groups in AD – either vault editors or consumers and populate them with users that way. Then import these groups to ADMS!  When users log in, they see this from Vault (which has dropped the explorer name for 2009) from Civil 3D: