Mastering the Autodesk Desktop Connector and Workflow Integration

TRAVIS BYERLEY: Welcome to Mastering the Autodesk Desktop Connector and Integration Workflow. I'm Travis Byerley. I come to you from St. Louis, Missouri. I represent PARIC Corporation and Cooperative Building Solutions. I have roughly 15+ years of technology experience in the A/E/C industry.

For PARIC and Cooperative Building Solutions, I lead our Facility and Technology Solutions Division. I oversee company-wide standards, technology processes, procedures, lead software implementation efforts within the companies, and I support our facility management platform. I have a Bachelor's Degree in Architectural Technology from Ranken Technical College in St. Louis, Missouri.

CRAIG GODFREY: Hi, everybody. I'm Craig Godfrey. I work for Autodesk. And I'm a Senior Product Manager there, and I look into Desktop Connector or look after Desktop Connector. I'm a part of the Autodesk Platform Services Group. I've been with Autodesk for about 21 years now in various roles such as quality assurance, experience design, and currently, product management. My main focus in this whole 21-year career here has been around data management and accessibility products such as Vault, Fusion, Fusion Manage, PLM 360 at the time when I was there, and also, now, Desktop Connector.

So just a quick statement. We have our safe harbor statement that we usually put up. There are a few things here that we may talk that's forward-looking statements and such. So we want to make sure that everybody remembers that don't make your purchasing decisions based on these things. A lot can change from now until then.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So why are you here today? Today, you're going to learn what the Desktop Connector is and how it has evolved since its inception. You're going to understand the benefits of using the Desktop Connector. We're going to talk about how Cooperative Building Solutions and PARIC have been successful with the install and implementation and give some best practices around that topic.

And then we're going to go into best practices around using the Desktop Connector and some troubleshooting tips. And then finally, we'll wrap up with looking forward to things that are coming up from Craig and his team and the roadmap.

CRAIG GODFREY: All right. So let's talk about Desktop Connector. And just from a high level, what is it? If we look at a lens as you, right? You are a person who may have access to Inventor, you may have access to Fusion 360, you do manufacturing-type work, or you could be a student who uses AutoCAD or uses Office products, and you could also be someone who's an engineer, an architect who uses Revit and Civil 3D. And you're using Autodesk products to connect to the cloud offerings such as Fusion, Drive, and Autodesk Docs.

Desktop Connector is a single install, and when you install Desktop Connector, it allows you to connect to all of those things. So as a single user, and in this case, me, I have access to Fusion, I have access to Autodesk Drive, and I have access to Autodesk Docs. So in this case, one single install allows me to access my data in the cloud, and sync my data locally from the cloud and to the cloud.

So here, you can see Desktop Connector in action. So basically, in the tray of Windows, you can pop that open and see the Home Screen. And here you can see that we're syncing some PDF files to Autodesk Docs. The Desktop Connector also integrates tightly with the Windows operating system. So if you're used to using File Explorer, you're used to using other syncing-type applications, you're very familiar with this. So here, you can see Autodesk Docs, you can see Fusion, you can see drive are connected inside of File Explorer. And I can get access to my files getting information about who has the file locked, if the file is local, if the file is in the cloud, et cetera.

Desktop Connector also integrates in with any application. So it's not just Autodesk applications that we integrate with. Whether you're using Adobe, you're using Word, you're using any kind of application-- AutoCAD, in this case-- you'll have access to the cloud through your application. So you don't need to change your behaviors. You can just do the workflows that you do today. In this example, you can see that we're inside AutoCAD 2025 looking at our open dialogue, and we can see that same data that was in Docs down here, and I can get that information and do my normal day-to-day workflows.

On top of that, what else is exciting about Desktop Connector other than being a sync tool to the cloud from your local machine to the cloud? Desktop Connector also enables a lot more things that can help you from your day-to-day activities. So number one, file references. We understand that files make up a whole data set, right? It's not just one file that makes up your data set or your design. It takes a whole lot of files to put that together to make your designs. Desktop Connector understands that and can crack open those files. And whether it's Inventor file an AutoCAD file, Civil file, even competitive products like SolidWorks, we understand references between those.

And we can display them here like you can see in Reference Explorer, where we can show you here's a list view, here's how many references there are. You can see a tree view of the structure, as well as a graph view, and get an understanding of how all these things play together. By having those references, it allows us to create really nice viewables, whether you're in Docs, whether you're in Drive, whether you're in Fusion, where you can view all of the details about your designs through the web. And that's empowered, basically, by the reference knowledge that we have.

Additionally, we mentioned AutoCAD earlier. You can also just directly go into Autodesk Projects or Autodesk Docs from AutoCAD itself. And Desktop Connector enables that and allows that to happen where we can show you properties. In this case, I dove into a Desktop Connector Novi project, and I'm able to see my files. I can see that someone has a file locked. So I get some status, and DC is allowing that to happen. Additionally, if you use Revit, Revit Linking is powered by Desktop Connector as well as Vault Project Sync. So if you're syncing Vault projects to Docs or Fusion, that's also using Desktop Connector technology to help make that happen.

So a quick look at the evolution of Desktop Connector. Kind of kicked off, started first release, so that 0 release was around 2016. So from 0 all the way up to the 14 versions was 2016 to 2021. This really was the foundational work. So getting Docs, Fusion, and Drive connectors starting with file references and file reference support. Revit Linking was introduced. Reference Explorer came about towards the end of 14.

Docs Manual File Locking Support. So when Docs introduced the ability to lock a file, DC also got that capability. And then Vault Project Sync. Again, we mentioned that. So being able to sync data both from Vault into Docs or Docs down to Vault. Next, we moved on to the 15 set of versions, so between 2021 and 2022. And we introduced new functionality like Change Workspace. So if currently when you install Desktop Connector your local workspace is found under your user profile, in some cases, you may want to have that in another location due to space constraints, or just to have the same type of pathing across all your users.

Plenty of Reference Explorer enhancements where we basically start to understand more about what's going on with the files and showing that to the user. We also improved File Explorer integration. So we swapped out some components which in a couple of slides here, we'll talk a little bit about how that caused a little bit of trouble for Travis and the group at PARIC. But that was good for some, not good for others, which we'll talk about.

We also did a bunch of improvements for AutoCAD in collaboration for Civil 3D workflows, making sure that those workflows were solid in Autodesk Docs, introduced file-naming standards, and then also the automatic lock and unlock. So where we had manual lock before, now we introduced, in certain versions of AutoCAD and Civil, the ability to automatically lock on open and then automatically unlock on close.

So then we have a major jump. So a total change in our tech stack allowing us to do a lot more functionality that customers were always asking for. And that started with the 16 version. So that was around 2022 when the first version came out. And then we're still doing those to the present day. The big thing here is getting native File Explorer commands. Before you were restricted to just commands that we put in the right-click menu. Now you can get basically all the things that you can do inside of File Explorer, you can do that while using and browsing Autodesk Docs, Data, Fusion Data, et cetera.

The Home Screen provides more information than it did before. So now you can actually go see the activity, what's taking place. Is it processing? Is it queued up? Is there any failures that I need to address? We also have automatic file lock and unlock. So where we just had it for DWGs, now we basically support all file types for automatic locking and unlocking on close.

We also improved long-path behavior. So previous versions, there's the Microsoft long-path restrictions. We would block being able to upload or open or download any files if they happened to have gotten into the system in 15 and 14. In 16, we're able to bring that data in and actually use that data. So good improvements there. The speed and performance is much faster when navigating through projects. In fact, I think this was one of the big things with PARIC from the 14 version, especially in the 15 version of navigating to projects was pretty slow. And so we've improved that in the 16 versions.

It also has improved open performance because now we know how to respect the overlays for DWGs, for example. So if it's an overlay, we don't need to download everything. If it's an attachment, we will. So that helps with performance of opens. We've introduced file conflict management. Where before if there was a conflict in the different versions between local and in the cloud, we would throw out the local version and just download the latest from the cloud. Now we give the user the option to choose-- what would you like to happen, keep mine, keep yours?

We also provided a virtualization guide. So if you're using a virtual environment, we provide some steps on how you can get Desktop Connector to work in a virtual environment. I mentioned Change Workspace before, but we also now have a way to deploy out with the Change Workspace. So as you're deploying DC across your company, you can set where that workspace is, as opposed to individuals having to do it themselves. Delete notifications to make sure that you can protect yourself from data being deleted. And then we've also introduced a sync Troubleshooting Utility that helps any kind of sync issues that you might be having in getting data up or down from the cloud.

So lots of details, a lot of stuff there. But you can see that we've progressed over time and now we're on the 16 version. And we'll go to the next day, which basically, is just a real quick comparison of 15 to 16 because this, again, was the biggest jump. And so the big thing from 15 or 14 performance was just much slower than what people are used to when using other sync tools. And so we've made a lot of changes in the 16 version to make that more like other tools and to be more based on feedback from the users.

The lack of native windows commands was a really big limiting factor. We've moved past that. And now in 16, you can have all of the aspects that you would have in File Explorer that you're used to. And then the collaboration challenges. So we, again, talked about only being able to auto-lock and unlock DWGs. In the 16 version, you can do that for all your file types. So basically, you're protecting from data loss, making sure that only you're working on something and other people don't steal that lock from you. And I'll pass it over to Travis.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: All right. So a lot that I'm going to talk about today has to do with building a strong partnership with your customer success manager. Constantly communicating with them is critical for them to be able to help assist you properly coming from a support perspective or just keeping you up to date with your tools that you're using from Autodesk.

For my example, my need from my success manager on the Desktop Connector was we saw this major slowdown, and then our computers started crashing. And that was when we moved from 14 to version 15.

So a little bit of our partnership journey with Craig and his product team. Let's go back to 2019 when we started using the connector. Internally, we heard about the great tool that Autodesk released. So we started to brainstorm internally here at PARIC and in ways that we could use it, anywhere from eliminating network drives to streamlining access to project data across different platforms, and the ability to assist us with some of our automations that we were trying to accomplish.

So we started with build 12 which had basic usage for us. We started testing out with a small internal group. And then at that point, the group decided that we should hold off. There really isn't a lot of usage here for us at this time. The system was a little buggy at that time. And then we provided this information back to our CSM, and she took it to Craig and his team.

Then we went to release 14. Again, did internal testing with a small group and decided the product was stable and it provided support to our workflows. And the main piece there was it allowed us to keep our project data all in BIM 360, in one central location where no matter where we were in the nation, we could access that data. So we decided to do a company-wide implementation.

Then version 15 was released. And as Craig was explaining earlier, there was some File Explorer improvements that were made. But for PARIC, it was not an improvement for us. We saw major slowdown with opening documents. Some of our computers were crashing. It was brutal. And this is when our CSM introduced us to Craig. [LAUGHS]

And some of those early-on conversations were heated. Our relationship started off a little rocky. I mean, we went from standing up in front of our entire company raving about this product and how it was the next best thing, to a couple days later when we pushed out version 15.2 and I had 50 calls in less than 20 minutes about not being able to open files or my computer crashed.

And that all had to do with the release of some improvements that they made. We quickly understood, talking with Craig, that this was not across all customer platforms. So then we went into troubleshooting internally, looking at our spam filters, our antivirus software, just to determine what is causing this. And come to find out, it was part of the shell-boost technology that they introduced.

The biggest piece here is working with your CSM and being able to get in touch with the project teams at Autodesk, it's one of the best things and best partnerships that we have been able to build with Autodesk here at PARIC.

CRAIG GODFREY: One thing that I'll just add too just from the Autodesk perspective, right? That it was my first customer experience as a product manager as jumping onto a team and onto a call. I learned some new language, so that was fun. I got yelled at a lot, but that's OK because we understood and we understand that companies are just trying to get their job done. And if we interfere, there's a big impact there. And that's why it was important for the CSM relationship, the product team relationship, get on a call, have conversations.

In fact, there was many calls with the product team with some of these third-party applications like the virus scanning and others that Travis was mentioning, to try to figure out what was interfering or are there ways to get through that. And ultimately, I think it got better. It just wasn't optimized enough. And I think he'll get into it. But rolling back to the previous version of 14 of how it was working, So we had sync-ups and monthly check-ins to talk about it. And as 16 was starting to come about as a concept, we made sure that we were sharing that with you.

So good back and forth. Obviously, you can see we all survived yelling at each other and we have a good solid relationship because of it. So I think it all worked out pretty well. And I think that's because it's good partnership.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: And let's be clear, I wasn't doing the yelling. And we don't have to worry about that person anymore. [LAUGHS]

CRAIG GODFREY: It doesn't matter who it was. We understood the whole thing.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: All right. So a little bit more. So the partnership that we built, it was over six to eight months. And Craig and team was showing us what they were working on for build 16. We were able to provide feedback. It's pretty rewarding just personally to be a part of a product development. And seeing and knowing that a team is listening to the customer, I can't say enough good things about Craig and his team from that front.

So let's move on. Let's talk about why a company should use the DC. From my standpoint here at PARIC, it is file synchronization. And again, it's having all of your project data in one location. It's very difficult to keep up with a Word document or a model or a CAD file in multiple different places. And as we are busy in our day-to-day, we forget to update documents.

And now you have your construction manager screaming because he doesn't see the same version as the precon manager or the scheduler. All of those things is why we use this when it comes to file syncing. And that goes into improved collaboration. Changes made by one team member, they're updated in real time across the project.

And then document storage. So here at PARIC, we eliminated some document storage costs. We took project files that were stored on a server or stored in one drive or in Dropbox, and we were able to utilize BIM 360, at that time, to house all of this information. And we saved quite a bit of money. And why pay for storing documents in multiple locations?

And then it also helped us with our integrations. It does not only integrate with Autodesk products such as AutoCAD, Revit, Civil 3D, Inventor, Navisworks, we have streamlined workflows with our ERP system, with Microsoft, Bluebeam, and Adobe, our scheduling software.

And then it also helped us eliminate our need for the VPN because a VPN connection is not required to use the Desktop Connector and access your project files. So another cost-saving tool. And it helps with security at that point.

So part of PARIC's implementation success is we first developed an implementation plan. We established what our objectives were for using the Desktop Connector. We put together a testing team. People across the entire company came together and tested out different versions of the platform before we released them to the entire platform. And then we developed a timeline. Here's how many days we're going to test the product, here's the rollout dates, so on and so forth.

CRAIG GODFREY: And just one real quick comment about the implementation plan too. I think the way you describe it of putting a team together to go through your workflows and see how everything is working is really critical because while we do our best to make sure that all applications and all workflows are working well for those applications, there's times where we do have gaps. We may need to go and make a different change for a certain application or workflow. So finding those gaps early before implementing, and then working with Autodesk to figure out how can we work on that, is it a known thing, it's really important to do that implementation plan and that testing upfront as well.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So then we jumped into the requirements, doing a requirement assessment. For us, that included an infrastructure. We looked at our background network. Was our internet connection stable enough to handle the sinking needs? So it's recommended to have a five-meg upload and a download speed. Then we went into reviewing our workflows. We needed to understand how the DC would integrate.

Sometimes, for us, we had to map out what that workflow was to see where the Desktop Connector was going to be useful and possibly where it would impact the workflow and make it worse. And then another requirement of that we needed to overcome was the hard drive space requirement. So typically, you need double the amount of space on your hard drive available for the files to sync and download properly.

And then our installation method. We had to determine how we get the product out to all 400 users at PARIC. It was a challenge because we, at that time, and still today, we do not let our end users install their own software. They do not have install permissions.

That [LAUGHS] is a lesson you'll learn the first time when it comes to letting your users install software on their own. And then I will explain a little later how we solved for our installation methods. And then the integration, being able to sync data, part of this is making sure the end users are syncing data correctly, that the files are syncing correctly, the workflow, adjusting workflows to incorporate the DC. That was really important.

And then some of the collaboration tools, make sure that they're functioning as expected. An example of this is version control. When a file is updated, make sure that that version is being updated in the ACC web.

And then training is a huge part of implementation. We have different platforms available to us for training and we have the Autodesk learning site. So there's on-demand e-learning resources there. Here at PARIC, and probably like most companies, you have your detailed workflows, and you need to get more in the weeds in your training documents. So we created some user guides and videos for those scenarios. And then we also not only provided these documents, but we did internal classroom trainings and virtual learning sessions.

And then it comes down to support, first line of support for us is our IT help desk, where we treat that as level 1 support. Anytime a user has any issues, we encourage them to email in to our ticketing system. But outside of that, Autodesk has a very good support system also.

And that's where your CSM can help there also create a support ticket. Have your CSM on that and they can internally see where things are moving with that. And then we use our support system at PARIC as an easy way to keep track of common problems and solutions for reference.

And then maintenance and updates. So monthly updates for the connector are typical. Personally, I look forward to them, rather if it's a bug fix, system enhancement, they release notes for the updates each month. And then we determine if they're critical and if we need to push the update. Part of that is knowing and communicating and testing the updates before you push them out. And we'll talk more about that in a few slides.

So a few key points on updating. Always ask yourself why. Why do we need to update? A lot of the times the updates include performance enhancements, improved file-syncing speed. So early on, 16, file syncing speed was a little slower. And now we're in 1610, and file syncing is a lot faster.

Many different integration options, new features, latest tools, and functionalities. Recently in 1610, we have the ability to view a document in the web now. And then a user can unlock their own file right there in the File Explorer versus going to the web and needing to unlock it.

And then bug fixes, issue resolution, and enhanced stability and reliability. Bug fixes are pretty big reasons why you would update. And then really just understanding if the features or the enhanced performance is necessary for your workflows.

CRAIG GODFREY: And then just one thing to add too before we jump to the next one is we release monthly. It's on purpose. We try to get these things out to everyone quickly. And the whole idea too, is that like you mentioned, Travis, you review it. You decide if it's good for you, if it's something that is a feature or a fix that you need, and then you can decide if you want to do that. So it's not that you have to. We don't force everyone to go to the latest. It's always good to be on the latest, but it's up to each individual to choose that.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: All right. So you may ask yourself, when should I update? And, again, review your monthly releases, review those notes. Here at PARIC, we decide as a company. So it's our discretion if we want to push out the release. And just right now, I think we are on a bi-monthly cadence for the release, but it just really depends on what's in those release notes.

And then some companies are user-enabled updates. So they allow their users to do the updates or install software. Here at PARIC, we manage all the updates. And we'll get into how we do that in a few slides. But most importantly to know and to take note of, when you're on version 16 and higher, you do not need to uninstall to do the updates. Click the button and let it update. It's very important not to uninstall.

All right. So how PARIC does the update? So we have Microsoft Intune to manage our devices internally here. So if you're not sure what Microsoft Intune, it's pretty much an MDM software. It allows you to control software updates, what software are available to your company. It's a pretty powerful tool for us.

So then for us at PARIC, we do control the installation. So we manage all the updates that get pushed out for any software. The Microsoft Intune allows us to have a company portal where all of our employees can open this portal and install the software that they have access to. And that's what this image here is showing. These are software that I have access to. And then which goes into the streamlined deployment of the software or the connector in this phase.

Because our users are not allowed to install their own software, Intune allows them to. But Help Desk not have to go and touch every computer. And then that also lets the user do it on their time schedule. So when an update is released, we send out a communication around-- here's this release, please get it installed by this date. If it's a very important release with a bug fix or a security enhancement if they don't install by a certain date, we will go in and turn off the service for the connector when they log into their machine.

And then another important part of Microsoft Intune is before we had this platform, we weren't able to see what versions of the connector people had installed. So here on the screen, you can see that for version 16.8 we have roughly 203 employees on that version. And that was a couple of weeks ago. So we're now moved on to 16.10. Here in this image, you're seeing all the different versions across the company.

So 16.8, there's 182 people with it. And then these older versions are either computers that are decommissioned or those users are not following directions. [LAUGHS] And then the reporting tool inside of Intune also shows you the device name, the email address, what versions of Windows they're on, what version of the DC they're on, and then when the DC was installed on that machine.

We did not know how to make Intune work for us with the connector. Other software that are Microsoft-based are really easy to put into that system. So we started doing some research and we came across the Autodesk Community Blogs. Very powerful information out there if you're not aware.

We typed in how to push out Desktop Connector and a couple of blogs came up. But we came across a post that said using Intune for installations and just went down that rabbit hole. And a community member-- his name is Omer Mushahwar-- has a wonderful article out there, step by step.

And we used those steps, put it into Intune. It still wasn't working. And then we reached out to Omer. And he was very responsive and really helped us through this. That's the power of the Community. It's there for all of us to communicate in and help each other out.

So moving on to some of the best practices. So as I said earlier, once you have version 16 installed, you do not need to uninstall to upgrade. It's very important. And it reduces some headaches, some additional steps there.

CRAIG GODFREY: And one of the big things that we do see that people are running into is when you do want to install, it leaves the local cache behind. And so when you uninstall, you install a new version. And then it fires up Desktop Connector and you get a bad environment, or you need to clean up the environment and Desktop Connector will shut down will happen. And it's very confusing to the user. So unless you're really trying to clean up and move on from DC, there's no reason to really uninstall.

You really just shut down Desktop Connector, run the installer over top, and then you'll be there. That keeps all your downloads local. So if you have a bunch of files that already downloaded, they stay there. If you have jobs queued up that were in process of running before you did the update, when you fire back up with the new version, those things will continue and you can pick up right where you left off. So you really want to make sure that you're using that in-place upgrade.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: And then you want to make sure that the DC is always visible in the Windows System Tray. When you first install the DC, it's going to go into that hidden icon area. You want to drag and drop that out into down there by the visible system tray icon. That is important because there are notifications and symbols that are going to show up on that icon and we'll talk about those in a minute. Or that minute is now.

[LAUGHTER]

So you want to really pay attention and know what all of these colored dots mean. If you are not signed in that is a big indicator of why you are not seeing your files sinking to build. Typically, that's mainly the problem, or the connector is hung up syncing another file.

And then in your File Explorer or inside of your Autodesk-provided software, knowing the status of your documents and paying attention to those status icons and that status column. Anytime you have that blue arrow spinning circle, that means documents are syncing. Typically, you can have a document that's not synced. And your Desktop Connector does not have any errors or symbols on there. And we'll talk about a troubleshooting tool later on that will help with that.

But just always pay attention to that. And for PARIC, we see our users sometimes forgetting that piece. And they'll open a file that's locked by somebody else and ignore the message that comes up on the screen in the software that says this is read-only or another user has this document open because they're moving so quickly. And then they make their changes and click Save, and you're not paying attention again to the message on the screen. And then they lose work. But using a cloud service drive or a network drive, those same things will happen.

CRAIG GODFREY: I'm just going to give you one thing to add too is one kind of misnomer that's out there is the Always Keep On This Device, right? You can choose a folder and those files to bring down without having to open them. And that brings them down. And then also when updates happen, someone else updates in the cloud, those versions will download to your local machine. The misnomer really is that that's the only way to keep files up to date from the cloud. And that's not true. Files that are already downloaded-- so that downloaded state that you see-- if the file is local, every 30 seconds we're checking for updates to see if there's anything in the cloud. We'll actually bring those updates down for those files as well.

The Always Keep On This Device is important for the Microsoft storage sense integration where, basically, you can configure it to say if files haven't been used for more than 14 days, remove it from the local machine so that it's just cloud only, still safe in the cloud, just removed the bits locally. That's what Always Keep On This Device is for, and that's the difference between those two states. So good one for everybody to just understand that you don't have to choose. Always Keep On This Device if you think that's the only way to keep the files up to date locally.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So another best practice that we run across a lot again is knowing when and where to open documents. Here, for example, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, in that native software, you cannot see that status column. So at PARIC, we recommend that everybody go to File Open and then navigate to the connector files, or just go directly to the File Explorer and open the documents in that manner because you can see the status column there.

CRAIG GODFREY: For this one, I can take on this one for long paths. I mentioned before, we're 15 and 14 version didn't handle long paths. So this is the Microsoft limitation. This isn't a Desktop Connector limitation. And so basically, for long file paths with the 16 version, we'll allow those files in. We'll allow you to upload, allow you to download. But when you start up, Desktop Connector will inform you when we find those long paths so that you're aware of them.

You can either go to them when you go to the View in step 2, view list of impacted files that you see. Travis shared some of his that he has. And that way you can go and you can just, one, be aware that that's in the system. And two, you could go to the web and you could then rename those files if you were trying to get the paths smaller. This does have a limitation though. So Desktop Connector, automatic file locking doesn't work for long-path files. Rename is actually a limitation in the APIs that are there for File Explorer. So that's why you have to go to inside the web to actually rename those files.

And then file references are also limited when you have a long path. And then just so you know too, if you don't have that dialog that pops up and you want to know, well, what are those? You can either go into the path shown here to see the start-up long path. So when I started up today, here's the long paths that are there. And then also when you subscribed, what were the long paths there? So this is just good for you to be aware, to understand that you have long paths, but there are some limitations. And keep in mind too that the applications themselves have long-path limitations. So like Excel doesn't handle long paths very well. So these are all good things to keep in mind.

We also have a best practices guide for, basically, the admins. So in our Help, we have a few that are pretty good to call out. So Example Deployment scripts, so we actually have an example of a deployment script you can download. So if you're not doing like what Travis is doing, you may have to just do a custom-type deployment, or you want to use a different software to do that. We do have an example of how you can best practice and install upgrades that we talked about, as well as ways to do the Change Workspace Guide.

So this is the one I talked about where you can actually push out for all users what the workspace is. So if you have software that you use for absolute paths are used, you can't use the user profile default path. You may want to have everyone point to See Autodesk so that everyone has the same padding on their machine. There's a guide to do that.

And then there's also the Virtualization Configuration Guide that we just released, which basically informs you how if you have a VDI, you use roaming user profiles, how you can configure that environment where Desktop Connector can function and work. But one kind of caveat there is that this is still an unsupported workflow, as in if you call support, they'll say this is something that's supported. You'll have to validate it on a physical machine. So again, this is an Autodesk policy. It's not specific to Desktop Connector.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: Let me get into some of the troubleshooting options that are available and that we use quite a bit at PARIC for our users. One, and most of the time for us it's a little bit of a user error, not paying attention to the symbols and the Status column, and not paying attention if they have a red on their connector or an orange colored dot meaning that they're signed out. And I just cannot stress that enough, just observing those types of notifications. It's different than working on a network drive.

CRAIG GODFREY: Yeah, I was just going to say, there's a few things like for, in general, so some causes. It could be a service outage. It could be something that's wrong at Autodesk. And you go to upload. It'll fail to upload. In those cases, we actually do have an auto-retry. So after a few, we'll retry to see if we can get it again. You may not even notice that it didn't go up the first time. There are cases where it doesn't go up, so it will fail, whether it's an unsupported file type that Docs doesn't allow in. It could fail and it'll sit there. We won't retry. It'll just be there and you'll have to do other methods to get past that.

It could be Docs Folder Permissions and how you have things set up. If you have View and Download permission and you're trying to add files, it's going to fail that you can't. And there's different tools that are available. So in the little arrow there pointing to the dot, dot, dot, for the one that's failed, you can go in there to retry just that specific failure. You can use resolve if there's file conflicts, which we'll talk about that in a moment. You can do Go To Folder.

So if it's a file that's not supported, you could get it out of there by just Go To Folder, pull it out-- because it'll never upload-- and then figure out what you need to do from there. And then Undo can fix various workflows where it kind of returns the file to the previous state. So if you did something like you accidentally deleted and it's in the Delete confirmation, you can restore, undo that so that the file gets returned. So there's various workflows in regards to generic troubleshooting and error messages.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: Yeah. So going back to some of the symptoms, if you have file upload conflicts or just failed uploads, the red icon in the system tray, not being able to see your change in the web. For us here at PARIC, it's I could upload a file and then a project engineer is saying, hey, I don't see your changes, what's going on? And then, as the image here is showing how you can get those resolved.

CRAIG GODFREY: And some of the causes that can happen here is there's timing. So if we both click on something at the same time, we may not get the lock. And so like one of us gets it, the other doesn't. The lock isn't established. You go on working and then you try to upload and you'll get a conflict like this that you can then resolve. So there's different situations. And there could be, bugs in the system that can happen as well or that allows we're locking doesn't occur and could cause this issue as well. So this at least gives you steps to choose what you would like to do. Take the one on the server and make and right over yours. Make a copy of it. It's up to you.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: Another piece there, a common issue that causes this for my users is if they are working in a document, they open it in the morning and then they're in it throughout the day and they're making their saves and they click Save and then shut the lid to their laptop real quick and it goes into a sleep mode, that typically causes a sync error. Or if they click Save and undock real quick from their desktop dock and it flips over to Wi-Fi, that little blip typically causes a little bit of an issue for them also.

But another way to resolve some of these issues is using the Troubleshoot Utility. If you have files or folders that are not uploading, it's a good tool that they introduced in 16.5, I believe, that--

CRAIG GODFREY: 16.7.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: 16.7, thank you. It's one of my favorite tools so far. So a lot of the times, our users will be in a native authoring platform in Microsoft Excel and they are, doing a Save As and they create a file folder. Well, that file folder has to sync before they can click Save. If the system doesn't know the file folder is there, it can't put a file in that folder. So that's really important. And that's probably one of the number one issues that my users have. But the Troubleshooting tool Utility, it resolves that.

CRAIG GODFREY: And it's one that you can scan. Basically, you choose a project to scan and it'll tell you if there's issues on both files not going up, as well as why files may not be coming down. So, you're like, I know there's a file update here. Why am I not seeing it? If you have it open in an application, we can't download that version. So this will at least tell you why you may be seeing something different. So that's another example.