Connecting Desktop Applications to the Autodesk Cloud Solutions

MIKEL MARTIN: Connecting Desktop Applications to the Autodesk Cloud Solutions, so if that's not what you're here for, now is the time to get up and go. Bad jokes. You'll hear them the whole time. Get used to it now. I don't take things too seriously here. All right, so-- oops, wrong way. That's the end, we're done. Oh, it's really dark.

My name is Mikel Martin. I am your instructor. That is pronounced Michael. I am a user experience architect here at Autodesk, and I primarily work on data management solutions. And over the last few years, I've been working on some of the cloud solutions. So in Fusion 360 Team, BIM team, another product called Desktop Connector, which we're going to talk a little bit today.

I've been working at Autodesk for about 11 years now. Before that, about 12 years' experience inside just doing CAD as designer. I was actually a customer at one point, just like all of you, and a reseller for a while. So I was putting together the slide, and my colleague Adam was over here, was like, which one's you? So if you can't tell, that one's me there in the picture. Bad jokes, I know. It's all right.

OK, so our objective here is introduction to different ways that you can connect your desktop applications to the Autodesk cloud solutions. I say solutions, because there are multiple solutions within Autodesk around cloud. Now, with the cloud, we tend to build things in the same back end system, but we tailor them to different customers. And so you're going to see that.

And you hear things like, Fusion 360 Team and BIM 360 Team, where they're very similar solutions, but they've been tailored to meet specific customers' needs. But we're using the same back end to do it. So we're going to show you how you can use those things with your desktop applications. But I do have to make one quick change the slide here, because some of these we're going to be talking about today, you actually can't do yet.

And then things that have not been released yet, are not available to you yet, or are available to a limited set of customers at this point in time. Thing is with Autodesk now that we're doing cloud solutions, for all of you who saw Amy's presentation today, you saw how we're releasing things more often. And we're trying to release things when they're ready, instead of [? using ?] a timeline.

So it makes it really hard to plan for a class for AU four months in advance, because you don't know what actually is going to be released when you go out. So some of the things we're talking about today, some of you can do, and some of you can't, depending on what it is, what technology and what subscriptions you have available to you. And I'll talk about those as we go along, but those, you can expect to have them in the near future.

I just don't want you to go back to your desk and go home and be like, he lied. I can't do this. [? I don't ?] [? know what you're ?] talking about. So I want to make it very clear. Because of that, our legal department really wants me to tell you this, that the things that I'm talking about here, some of them are future things. They are the plans that we have right now. Plans do change.

We have no obligation to notify you of those changes, if they do, so you shouldn't make purchasing decisions based on those future things. Again, legal makes me say that, so it's all good though. We'll get it out of the way. So you know, as I was putting this class together, I started thinking about, what does it mean to go to the cloud? When we talk about connecting the cloud, going to the cloud, why does anybody care, really? What's the purpose of it?

Because we talk about it a lot. But the real power of that, though, is that when we go to the cloud, what we're really trying to do is connect together the pieces, the various pieces that are out there-- either the pieces of technology. There are different personas, different people, who want to be able to share data with each other. So bringing all of it together and having something in the cloud or on the internet allows us to be able to connect them together more easily in a way that's available everywhere, right?

So a lot of you probably are already using some of the cloud solutions, and you kind of get it. But I think it's relevant to remind us of that when we start talking about connecting these solutions to the cloud, because in the end, we don't really want to make you change the tools that you're using to connect to the cloud, because there's tools you've been using for a while.

You've been using AutoCAD and Revit and Inventor and all these other things that are out there, or even other competitive solutions. But you want to take advantage of the cloud. You don't want to change your tools. And so as we're moving forward, and for those of you, again, who saw in the presentation today, you can see that we're taking this tack to trying to connect the tools you have already to the cloud.

And these are some of the ways that we're doing that now or will be in the very near future. By the way, if you have any questions at all, please interrupt me in the middle. If it gets too long, I'll take it offline. But feel free to interrupt with questions. All right, so first I want to do is I want to talk about some of the actual cloud solutions. And I don't want to turn this into a class on those, but I just want to review them real quick, because you may not be available to all of the things-- or have knowledge of all the things that are out there that you can connect to.

So I just want to talk about it real quick, as a baseline. So here's a kind of a list. The color on this projector is really off. Here's a list of products or solutions that we have in the cloud right now, or potentially coming soon. And we're going to talk about all of these at some point, and there are other solutions, too. But this is what we're going to focus on today, and you'll see why as we go forward.

Most of these you can get access to as a subscription to other things. So if you have a desktop application or some other thing, and you're a subscription customer, you can get access to them, or will be able to in the very near future, depending on the product. As an example, if you are a Fusion 360 user, you can have access to Fusion Personal or Fusion Team, depending on what tier of Fusion 360 you're using.

And that just comes as a value add with that product. The same thing is true with BIM Team. Depending on some of the BIM products you might have, you have that included as part of your subscription. So we're going to talk about some of these other ones as we go forward. These ones on the bottom here, they're also available as a standalone subscription, so you can just purchase those without having a subscription to something else.

So I want to start off talking about Shared Views, and I'm starting with this one because it's a little bit of an outlier with the rest of these solutions. And you'll see why as we go forward. But it's a little bit unique, compared to the other ones. And the idea behind Shared Views is to solve a problem-- again, talking about connecting the pieces together-- in that we have the same problem that we've had for a long time, as users of CAD or any other solution as well.

Like, how do I take what I have and give it to other people easily, get feedback, collect that feedback, without necessarily giving them all the data that I don't want them to have? Right? I [? want ?] to give them my CAD drawings. I want to just give them feedback and be able to give them-- so that was something-- in the very beginning, we did prints.

Back in AutoCAD 12 days, when I started using AutoCAD, we would just plot it out on a plotter and send it to people, or do the [? V-size ?] prints. And then we started [INAUDIBLE] things like PDF and DWF. But really, shared views is trying to solve a very similar problem to that. How do I get this data to somebody else without giving them the actual CAD data? So with Shared Views, you can go into the product.

Here I have the author of the data, and you can go into the product, created a shared view, a lightweight representation of that model is created, and it's put into the cloud. In return, the author gets a link or a URL that takes other people to that model, or to that representation of the model. And that's really the only way they can have to get access to us.

Anybody who has the URL can get access to the file. There's no browsing folder structures. It's just, this is the URL. And then they can go in there and do markups and commenting. And the author then gets those back again. It's just a quick, simple way to share data with other people. You saw this a little bit in Amy's [? MainStage ?] today, and I'm going to show you in more detail.

But the interesting thing about this is that when you publish it, you have the option to set an expiration date. So by default, the expiration date is 30 days, and then it expires, and no one can have access to it anymore. So it's just to get an idea of, you don't want the data out there forever and ever, people just be able to access it. It's not meant to be a permanent record. It's a, I want some feedback on it. I want to get comments on it. I want to get the data back in again.

So I'm going to show you a demonstration of how this works, and I'm going to use a product that probably most of you aren't using. The reason why I did that is because, you know, we talked about the legal department at Autodesk. It makes them much happier when I show you things that have actually been released, instead of things that haven't. So whenever I have the opportunity to, that's what I'm going to show you.

So in this case, I'm going to show you a product called PowerShape. And this is something that our manufacturing customers use, and this is showing a tool or a mold. And PowerShape, yeah, it was part of the PowerMill product suites that we purchased not too long ago. So I'm going to show you this, but this will be rolling out to other products as we go forward.

And so you probably don't have it in your AutoCAD, or you have it right now, but you will in the very near future. So let's just talk about what happens here. So I'm inside PowerShape, and the first thing I'm going to do is [? with ?] this mold, is just go through and blank out some of the parts. And this product is called Blank, so I'm just going to right-click in Blank.

The reason--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHTER]

MIKEL MARTIN: Out! So the reason that I'm doing that is because what I want to show here is that when I create the shared view, is that it's not uploading the part, and it's showing me the shared view at the current state of the model, not as it's saved or as it is on disk. It's the current state in memory. So I'm going to go to my shared view command here, and when I do, I'm just going to give it a name.

So it's going to be my shared view, or my demo shared view. And then when I create it, you'll see it's going to calculate for a few seconds here and publish that lightweight model to the cloud. You can see in the very bottom, kind of see a progress bar going there, and it's going along, and it's going to create, in the end, it's going to publish and create a URL or a link that I can give to other people.

So here it is. There's my URL. It's kind of a tiny URL. I can copy the link and hit OK. And then if I go to my browser-- so I'm using Chrome here-- and I just paste the link in there, it'll take me to the shared view. And so that's just how I get to it. It's very simple. [? You can ?] load it up, and now you notice I don't have anything installed.

This is all based off of web viewing. So anybody can just go and view it. You can rotate around in 3D and look at the component. And if you can measure it, do things like that. So again, it's kind of like, you know, when we had [INAUDIBLE] was pretty popular for a while, and then PDF, same kind of idea. But as I move around here, I'm going to show-- now I'm going to explode it.

So that it can do the exploded view, just to talk about the fact that this is actually pretty intelligent. It still knows these are all individual parts. You can measure and work on that, and you can save views here. So [INAUDIBLE] go back to my home, and then I'm going to rotate around to the right spot, and then I'm going to create a markup, which then will show how it creates a snapshot.

So when I go into the markup view-- you'll see the markup button down on the bottom here-- you'll see it flash. And the idea is this is taking a snapshot, and it's kind of telling you that. Like, OK, now it's a static view. My rotate's gone away. This is the view that I'm creating the markup on. I can create a leader here and then some text, just to kind of show the snapshot or the markup.

So I'll just call this, can you verify this is the right size, as an example. And it really can be anything. Then once I create the text, you can move it around and change it, edit it. And you'll see here, I'm showing you can move it around. When I hit done, you're going to see now, it's going to create a thumbnail of that markup and when I created it and who created it.

And now I'm going to go just to my home view again and create just a comment. So here I go, I'm inside the viewer. I'm just going to create a comment real quick, to verify the height, as an example. And then when I hit OK, to create the comment, it's actually going to create another snapshot or a thumbnail of what it looked like when I created that comment, what view I was looking at.

So now I'm going to close this and go back to PowerShape. And then when I go back into the shared views, you'll be able to see-- I'll be able to see which views that are available, that I've created. So if I go to my shared views again, turn on the shared views panel, I get a list of all the shared views that I've created from this product.

So here, you can see I have one, and it has two comments on it. So if I go back, click on it again, it takes me back to that web view of it. And then if I go back and click on one of the thumbnails, you'll see that changes the view back to what it was when I created that comment or that markup. So I go to the markup itself and click on it, and you see how it just rotates back there again so I can see it.

I can look at it, and then I can just hit resolve, and it will go away at that point and say, OK, I got it. I've gotten the information that I need. And if I click on the other one, then it will go back to that view as well. So that's shared views in a real quick overview. Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: So right now, I don't think there's any information [? on them. ?] That's something that we may add forward, but anybody who has the link can get access to it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: So the question was whether it will be available for 2D AutoCAD drawing as well? It will be. It's not at the moment, but as these products [? grow, ?] AutoCAD will have this technology. Inventor, Rivet will all have the shared views.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: Well, that's what he was asking, too, the authentication. So right now, I don't think there is. Just anybody who has the link.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: No. But that's good feedback. We'll take that back and make sure. I think I actually believe that that's coming in the near future as well. It's just not where it's at right now.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: Yeah, so he was saying, you can use Fusion Team. This is supposed to be a lightweight tool. The other products have more security on them as well. It's a very good point. OK. Other questions on this one? No? OK. All right. So that was shared views.

So I want to talk about the rest of these. And these all have something in common. So we have something called Autodesk Drive, which we'll go over in a minute. Fusion Personal, BIM 360 Team, Fusion Team and BIM Docs. And all of these are essentially, at their core, data storage or collaboration sites. And so if I just real quickly cover these, so you have Autodesk Drive.

What this is, is a solution that will be available to you from a subscription of your other tools. So you can't actually just go out and buy this. If you own a subscription to something like AutoCAD or Inventor, you'll have access to this. If you're the administrator of your subscriptions, you'll be able to turn it on for certain users or turn it off. Right? And so the idea is it's simple cloud storage, available anywhere.

It's meant as a single-user environment, but you can bring other people into the environment and share the data with them. And it has [INAUDIBLE] support and viewing as well, so it's just a lightweight tool to be able to push data up to the cloud, and we're going to talk about how you do that in a minute. Then there's Fusion 360 Personal. So if you're using Fusion 360, the CAD system right now, there's a good chance that you're using Personal.

That's been a default to using. You can use Team if you have a paid subscription to Fusion 360. And in the near future, they're going to make it a whole lot easier to transition from one to the other. But it's similar to Drive, and it's single storage. It's really meant for the single-user environment, where you can share. But it also has history support, viewing and markup and commenting.

And then we just go down the stack here. BIM 360 Team and Fusion 360 Team are very similar products. Again, somewhat tailored to the market and who uses them. But again, they're essentially CAD storage and collaboration tools that allows you to put data up there and share with other people. These are really meant as a team environment versus the personal spaces that we just talked about.

They have more security and roles. They have projects and have history support as well. And then BIM 360 Docs is essentially-- take what we just said about Team and then add other functionality onto it as well. So there's [? full-level ?] security. There's [? sheet sets, ?] and there's property extraction, including extraction from things like PDFs.

So this is not really meant to be a class on BIM Docs and all the things it can do, but this is really super high level. That's the things that it can do for you. What we want to talk about is how you can easily connect to your desktop applications-- and really any desktop application, not even the ones in the Autodesk family-- to these solutions.

So we're going to talk about something called desktop connector. So you might be asking yourself, what is a desktop connector? And I'm really glad you asked that question, because I would like to tell you about it now. OK, so the idea is, any one of those products-- I'm just using Fusion Team to talk about. It could be BIM team as well, and it's something in the cloud, right over here on the one side.

On the other side, I have my desktop or my laptop with things like AutoCAD and Inventor and Revit and all these other applications like Word and PowerPoint and Excel and all these other things that I use in my daily life. And I really want to connect this data to over there, and I want to do it simply and easily. And so the idea is, if you install the desktop connector for Fusion, it will transfer that data over for you.

And I'm going to get into some of the details of what that means right now. The way it presents itself to a user once it's installed is essentially like a hard drive, right? So I have Fusion 360-- this is inside Windows Explorer. There's also a Mac version of this as well.

And if I have this, what we call a virtual drive, inside my Windows Explorer that I can go and access, if I go and browse that data, you'd see I can see it. I can see the [? caddy ?] that's up there. I can see the thumbnails. If I were to go to Fusion Team, I would see the same data that's there, right? One looks like the other. Also, if I was to go into the application and browse that data with the open dialog box, I would see the same data. Right? Pretty simple.

So anything that I put there, I can see, open, and access through this virtual drive. OK? So for example, I as a user might have the Fusion desktop connector installed. I might have the desktop connector for Autodesk Drive installed, and I might have the one for BIM 360 installed. Or I could have all of them installed.

So here I've shown you inside Windows Explorer all of them together. Now, we don't expect most people to do that, but you could.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: So the question was, those files that get stored there, can you access them programmatically through Forge? And the answer is yes. So as we build out the Forge solution, anything you put in the cloud will be-- if it's already-- accessible through Forge. And really, this is just showing you the same data that you see inside BIM Team or Fusion Team and things like that.

All right. So at this point, you might think, well, isn't that really similar to Dropbox and Box and Google Drive and then you have something else called A 360 Drive? And there's actually a pretty big difference between this solution or these solutions and those other, traditional solutions. Those solutions are all what we call sync tools.

What that means is that when I have a sync tool, any files that I want to be able to view and access or browse in my virtual drive, and a sync tool has to be downloaded before I can see them, which works really well if you're doing some Word documents, and you have some limited set of data.

But what we come to realize is that a lot of our customers have much bigger sets of data, and they don't really want all that data on their hard drive all the time, and they don't want every single change being propagated throughout their network as well. So the desktop connector solutions are what we call a virtual drive, or sometimes we call them infinite folders.

The key is it's more like a web page. So if you think about it, when I go to the Fusion Team or BIM Team and I go look at it and I browse that data, we don't make you download all those files before you can see the thumbnails and the file names, right? That would be ridiculous. Why would you do that? Desktop connector is the same thing.

When I'm browsing and I'm looking at these folder structures, those files are not on my machine, and they're not there until I open them. At that point, they're cached. If you open them again, they're still there. So there's no sense in downloading them again. And if they've changed, we check. At that point, you would open, and we'd download them.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: OK, so the question was, do they stay permanently, or can they disappear after a while? Right now, they're there permanently. In the very near future, there'll be a way to clean it up automatically. The other big difference between this solution and the other solutions we talked about, like your traditional Dropbox and Box and Google Drive, is that we support references.

So the idea here is-- I'm showing an Inventor assembly, and I'm showing in AutoCAD [? that ?] references kind of diagram-- that we know how to read this data, and we know how to, when you upload it or download it, be able to handle that data for you. I'm going to show that to you in a minute here. The other interesting thing is that we don't need those applications to be even installed on the machine to be able to help you with those [INAUDIBLE] references or those links, to be able to pull them out of the files.

In the first iteration of desktop connector, we support Inventor, AutoCAD, and SolidWorks. I think the SolidWorks one is really important, because what we're communicating here is we're not interested in just supporting the Autodesk family of products. So you're going to see more of these reference types supported. Some of the other ones we're working on right now are things like Civil 3D and Revit, so you're going to see those come along as we go forward.

So as an example, I have my Windows Explorer I've [? roused ?] to my project. It's kind of an empty folder right now. If I drag that assembly file or my AutoCAD file, the desktop connector tool will go through and find all the references for you and upload them as well, because it really doesn't make any sense just to have the assembly file or just the AutoCAD file [INAUDIBLE] references, right?

You need all of that to go up there. But you don't want to go looking for where-- it could be everywhere, right? On your network. So we're going to go find it. We're going to put it up there for you. And then when you go and view on the web page, so here I'm showing the assembly, I'm showing my uses view. It's showing me all the references. So I have a record of all those references in the cloud, which we use for a lot of things, for as far as managing those references, being able to view and create viewables of it.

And when you go to view it, there it is, the entire assembly is [INAUDIBLE] for you, or the AutoCAD structure. So hopefully, at this point, you're thinking, well, how do I get this? It's actually really simple. So in this example, I'm looking at BIM Team. And down at the bottom of my profile menu, I have the desktop connector. So if I enlarge that, that's what it looks like.

So if you're using Fusion Team or BIM Team right now, as of-- I don't know, what? Four days ago? That is in your menu, and you can go download it and install it and use it. All right, so let me show a demonstration of how this is going to work. So here I have my Windows Explorer. I'm going to have BIM 360. I have my Autodesk Drive.

I have Fusion Team, Fusion 360 Team, virtual drives here. And I'm actually going to use Fusion 360, but BIM Team would work exactly the same way. So I'm just going to navigate in, [INAUDIBLE] on my PC. And if I wasn't logged in right now, I'd get a prompt for my Autodesk ID at that point in time. And I can see all my team environments or all my hubs that I have in my project.

I have one here called One Fusion Share. Inside here I have my Project for Demos, so you'll see all my projects inside that environment. When I go in here, you'll see it's an empty folder, so nothing there right now. So I'm just going to right-click, New Folder, create a new folder. I'll call it My Designs. And then behind this window, I have another Windows Explorer open already, so I'm just going to shrink this one down a little bit, if I go into that folder.

And what I want to do is I want to bring this [? suspension ?] assembly over here. But what I've done is I've created probably what a real world looks like, just a bunch of junk files that I don't care about, a bunch of folders that I don't care about. And where the parts are exactly in that mess is, I don't know, and I don't want to go find out.

So I'm just going to drag that one file over to there. Now because this is Inventor, it knows. It's smart enough, it knows it needs a project file that will figure that out. If you know anything about Inventor, you understand that. But that's the only one that has that prompt like that. So it's going to say, OK, and your project file. And then it's going to go see my little progress, it's kind of figuring things out for a second. It's going to find those references.

And again, the same workflow would happen for AutoCAD as well. So if I bring that up, you can see the progress bar going there. And then once it's done, you'll start to see the files come over to the other side. I'm just going to hit Refresh real quick, and you can see. Now, this data is right now on my local cache, and it's in the process of uploading.

If you look down at the bottom there, you see that little white A. It's kind of hard to see with this projector, but there's a green dot on there. And it just went away. And it's showing me that it's done uploading now. If I go in there and browse, I can see, well, I have a bunch of parts in this folder. And it wasn't all the parts that were in the original folder.

And if I go to the other ones, it's like, OK, it looks like maybe somebody put some weird folder structures in there that I would have never just found on my own. That's kind of the point, is that we're going to go help you. And we're going to try to recreate that folder structure as it was the best we can. And then so once I have that, what I'm going to do is now clean that up.

And so I'm going to take that path from over there and copy it over here, and it's going to take me-- so I'm going to have two windows looking at the same place right now. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into one folder, go to the other folder, and just drag and drop between them to be able to move files around in the cloud. Remember, all of this is happening in the cloud.

This is not a representation of just what's in my local machine. So I'm just going to drag these files over here, and you'll see that they'll get-- you know why progress happens here? Because it's actually going and talking to the cloud right now. And then, when it's done, [INAUDIBLE] from over here, and it will appear over here, just like you would hope they would, right?

Now, if you are a regular CAD user, you're thinking, what is he doing? He's moving files around. He's going to break their relationships. I'm going to show you in a minute here that's actually not true. Because it's in the cloud and we have those all stored in a database, basically, we know how to heal those up. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to move these assemblies as well, just to really mess with my assembly structure.

Or like I said, if it was AutoCAD structure or whatever else. And once I have all that where I wanted, I'm going to actually go through and do some renaming as well. So once I go to my suspension, I hit Go To. This is going to take me actually to the web page now for-- this is [INAUDIBLE]. So this is the Fusion one. It could be the BIM one.

It's going to show me my assembly here that it uploaded and all the [? uses ?] information, and it could drill down and see that at every level as well. So we've recorded all those in a database. If I go here, I can actually say, delete these folders. And so the reason why I'm going to delete those is I want to go back and show you that this is going to update in real time what's in my Windows Explorer view.

So these are the folders that I emptied, and then when I go back and hit Refresh, now they're gone. And if I was to wait a couple seconds, it would refresh on its own. But just for speed's sake. So those are just gone now, because I deleted them. So I'm going to go into this other assemblies folder now, and here, I have wheel R and wheel L. Not very descriptive. I'm going to actually put in the words, if I do rename. I'm going to say wheel right.

And so it's actually communicating right now with the cloud, renaming that. And I'll do wheel left. And then if I go back-- just go back and forth just to show you this-- if I then go back to the web page and I go into that folder, you'll see that that's happened already here. So down at the corner here, I have wheel left and wheel right have been renamed. So again, it's the dynamic. It's not a sync. It's happening in real time.

So I'm going to rename right here as well, just to show you both happening. If I go back over here to do a refresh, I'm seeing the name has changed here as well. Again, a kind of a real-time link. And now, if I go back out, and I open up the assembly, you'll see that when we actually download those, or even if it's not downloaded and you just use what's in the cache, we have enough intelligence, enough information to actually heal that assembly up, and so that it won't get any resolution errors.

So I just moved about 10 files and renamed three different ones, and I didn't get a single resolution error. And so if I actually go down here, you'll see that this actually has the right name of the parts as well. So when I go to scroll down, and my shock body assembly-- you see it change the name of it there, and it's got the right name in it.

[INAUDIBLE] scroll down further, you'll see wheel left in there as well. This is just to prove that you got the right data there. And if I go to the actual assembly and look at it, again, I can view it and see the assembly structure. So there it is. So I got it all up there just by dragging and dropping, and now I can view it, look at it, play with the data, manipulate it.

But really what's most important, I think-- click to there-- is what happens when I go to a different computer? Or I'm a different user on a different computer? Either one. In this scenario, I'm going to pull up Inventor. I'm going to go to the Open Dialog box. And I'm going to browse that same structure inside the application. Now on this computer, this user's never opened these files.

And so when I go to browse this, I can see those same virtual drives on my Open Dialog box. And then I go browse the same structure. And when I'm seeing these folders here, like My Design and these files here, they're not on this machine right now. When I click on Open, you're going to see a progress bar appear. The same progress bar would appear for any application, if it was Word or PowerPoint or SolidWorks or AutoCAD or whatever else.

And so it's telling me it's downloading that. It's [INAUDIBLE] references for the Inventor files, and it opens it up. Question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: Yes, so the question was, what happens if you're not on the cloud? We have an offline mode, so if you go to the little [INAUDIBLE], you right-click, it'll go offline. And then anything you have already opened is cached for-- if it's been opened in the last 72 hours, it'll be cached. And all the files are there, as if they were never in the cloud. So the Inventor references are [? healed ?] in the assembly file, and it all still works. So I kind of messed myself up here for a second.

So what I want to show now is if I actually open this up and make a change to it, so I'm just going to quickly go in and just delete these components and hit Save. So it's not a real big change, right? Doesn't really matter. Just to kind of show, again, that I'm not really working any differently than I was as a user, even though I'm working in the cloud.

So I made a change, I hit Save. A little tray icon [INAUDIBLE] a little green dot on it. But as a user, I probably don't even really notice, and those changes are all being uploaded, again, with all the references that need to be there. If you added new references, they would be added to the cloud data as well. So the little green dot just appears.

If I then go to my Fusion Team site, and I browse for that data, and I click on the assembly-- now this assembly just was updated one minute ago. You'll see that there. And I go in here. It hasn't generated the viewable yet, so I got a little ahead of it. So it's going to tell me, OK, I'm still generating. You got to wait a couple seconds. This will be typically what you'll see.

And then when it's done, you can actually tell it to send me a link, if you want to, if you don't want to wait. But then the viewable will just refresh itself and show up. And then if I go in and zoom, you'll see that these changes that I just did are now in the cloud. And the interesting thing about all of that is because we've integrated at the operating system level, the basic level of just file open, transfer files, upload the files-- all that will work with pretty much any application.

The only thing that's different is when we say we support Inventor and AutoCAD and SolidWorks is if we just put references or not. And there are more coming. So here, if I go and I just zoom in, you can see that the bolts are gone, just to prove that it made it up there. None of that-- by the way, that video was just me straight-shooting video. It wasn't edited. It wasn't waiting. It's real time.

OK, so if you have desktop connector installed, on the web page, there's a new feature called Edit on Desktop, which used to be only there for Fusion files, if you were using Fusion 360. But now, with BIM Team and Fusion Team, if I go to any file and hit Edit on Desktop, and you have desktop connector installed, what will happen is the web page can communicate to desktop connector on your machine. It will download it and then give it to the app to open.

It's essentially the same as if you went to the Windows Explorer and said right-click open or went to the application open [? and hit ?] open as well. So kind of this integrated, full workflow, depending on how you want to get to your data.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: So, OK. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: OK, so you're asking about file lock. Right now, no. But we're working on something as a way for you, both of you would be able to know that you're both in the same file at the same time.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: The last one wins, right now.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: So just a little interesting thing that I figured out the other day when I was playing with all this stuff is that inside Inventor, you actually can-- they have this thing called the Team Web, and you set up a web page to be your default home page. I actually went and made Fusion Team my default home page, and then I could use the Edit on Desktop to actually browse and hit Edit and open it up inside Inventor.

And the really interesting thing about that is that I was able to go in and actually view the viewable inside Inventor, and there's an Edit on Desktop command in here as well. So I can use it as my lightweight viewable, as like a preview in real time and look at it, and if I want to open and hit Edit. And it'll open up inside Inventor.

The interesting thing is that most of our applications have a similar tool in them, where you can embed a web page into your home page as well. I was able to do it with AutoCAD and Revit as well. Just an interesting little idea that we're working on. So any questions on that so far?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: So the question was, can you reconstruct a view back into Inventor? Well, no, but the Inventor files are all up in the cloud, so you should be able to open them. But the viewables themselves are just a lightweight version of the [? bigger ?] data, so you can't reconstruct it into the model and open it again.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: I'm sorry, say that again.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: Something like that, yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: Yes, that's what he was just asking as well, so they're-- no, that's all right. So the question was, how do you handle conflicts? Right now, it's last one wins. So we are working on something that's called-- well, I forget what it's called. But the idea is that you would be notified if you're both in the same file at the same time, and then warned and if you both try to edit the same file at the same time. It's not out yet, but that's our plan.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKEL MARTIN: Yeah, yes. Other questions before I move on? We'll have time at the end as well. No? OK, how we doing on time? Oh, we have plenty of time. All right, so I'm going to talk just real quickly about the Inventor, [? any ?] CAD in Fusion 360. And so you saw a little bit of this, again, today in Amy's presentation.

I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but I'm going to show you a class that's going to happen later today. It's going to go into a lot of details about it as well, but I just want to touch on it real quick. And the idea is, you know, if I have a model inside Inventor, and this is actually the handle for a reel, a fishing reel. So I have this model inside Fusion 360, I should say, and then I want to be able to insert that into my Inventor model [INAUDIBLE], but I want to do this [? associatively. ?]

If you have desktop connector installed for Fusion, what you do is you go into the Inventor insert command-- the normal insert command you normally use. You browse the Fusion 360 desktop connector, pick out a Fusion file, and it will insert it just like it would any other part. Interesting thing is you can actually do that without the assembly being in the cloud. It can be just a local assembly file.

And if you put it on a network drive, for example, and someone else opens it, and they also have desktop connector installed, they would get the refreshed data as well. And so it's talking back and forth between these two [? and to ?] make that work.

AUDIENCE: So that file [INAUDIBLE]?

MIKEL MARTIN: No. So they're going to go into this in the class. I would highly recommend, if you're interested, [INAUDIBLE]. But basically, it is a parametric version of that Fusion file inside Inventor. And if you do associations like constraints and stuff, and then there's an update, you don't lose them. So it's a true associative insert of the Fusion files.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

MIKEL MARTIN: You can either add direct modeling to it or go back to Fusion and modify it.