How You Can Help Influence the Next Version of AutoCAD

BUD SCHROEDER: Welcome to Autodesk University and our recorded session. This is the safe harbor statement. Take a quick look at it. Most of it doesn't apply to our class, but if you need to, you can hit pause and take a look at it. All right. Let's get started. This is how you can help influence the next version of AutoCAD. It's about the AutoCAD Customer Council Alpha/Beta program. My name is Bud Schroeder. I'm the AutoCAD Customer Council administrator, and my Twitter account is @budacad.

Our learning objectives. I'm just going to highlight. They are what our presentation are going to be about today. Learn what the AutoCAD Customer Council Alpha/Beta program is. Learn how you can become part of the AutoCAD Customer council and help influence the next AutoCAD based products. Notice that's plural. Learn how you can help influence the next version of AutoCAD, AutoCAD web app, AutoCAD mobile, and AutoCAD toolsets.

A quick note about the web and mobile. We don't do year-round betas with those. We do them on-demand based on features. For example, we did a session for LISP when we had a LISP AutoCAD Web. I created a custom survey. We found customers that were using AutoLISP and then we invited them in to take a look at it. And so the web and the mobile team will do things like that.

A quick note about the photos on the right. I took all of these photos except for one. My wife took one. And they were taken in Alaska. It was our 40th wedding anniversary, and we tend to do a cruise or something in Alaska on our big anniversaries.

We were married in 1984, in San Francisco with the Norwegian Seamen's Church, and then we went to the Royal Viking cruise line ship that was in Port, had our reception there, and then we sailed to Alaska. So for every big anniversary, we like to do that. And I used a Sony A7 IV, that you can see right here, to take all my photos. There we go.

Introduction. A little bit about me. I spent 12.5 years as a CAD/IT manager for a power utility here in Northern California. I was also an Alpha, a Beta, and a Gold Site. We'll talk a little bit more about the Gold Site stuff as we get farther along in the presentation. I joined Autodesk in 1997. What happened was Autodesk came up to visit me as a customer and they wanted to beta test the NLM, network loadable module, for the license manager.

And so a programmer and a QA engineer came up to visit with me, and at the end of the day, the QA engineer said, you know, how come you've never applied to work at Autodesk? So in 1997, I went to Autodesk. Most of my career at Autodesk has been as a senior QA engineer, except for a four year stint where I went to-- I think around 2013, I went to the Cloud Platforms team and worked on those products. We also ran the very first mobile beta at Autodesk for A360.

Currently I run the AutoCAD Customer Council Alpha/Beta program. I was asked to come back in 2018 to run this program. I've been an AU speaker for many years. I've taught licensing, install, custom deployments, migration, customization in AutoCAD, a lot of things like that. And on my door next to my closet, I have all the badges from all the years. So you can see it's kind of interesting because I have this Ask Me About AutoCAD. I'm also wearing my I Love AU pin, which came off of that stack.

This one here was before I joined Autodesk when I worked for the power utility. It was probably '95 or '96 because it was Autodesk University. Before that, it was not North American AutoCAD University or AutoCAD user group. And then here are all my shirts. I have a ton of shirts. In the process of taking these out to take a quick picture, my cats decided to join. And Chester, he's the big boy. These are brother and sister, by the way. They had to climb all over the shirts. And of course, put them all back in the closet and they were not happy with that. And the eagle at the side is from Sitka, Alaska.

What is the AutoCAD Customer Council? It's where you can download updates for Alphas and Betas, run Alpha and Beta in your browser, post feedback in the forums, make feature requests, vote on your feature requests. That's important because the more people that like feature requests, the more it bubbles up to the top so our product managers take a look at it and are interested in it.

And create problem reports. If you're having issues, you can create problem reports. Take the surveys. One of the most important things you can do in the Beta program, because everyone sees the reports I create from the surveys. So it's a great way to influence the next version of AutoCAD.

How can I join the AutoCAD Customer Council? This is probably the best slide in the deck. And the first of all, there are multiple ways to become a member. We created a link just for AU. You'll find this all over the place if you come see me at the Answer Bar. For those of you that are live, I can give you the link. Or right here, I'm going to give you the link. Now it's https://feedback.autodesk.com/acad_au.

And that will take you right into the sign up for becoming a member of the Customer Council. You can also go directly to the Autodesk feedback portal using the following URL, and that's the https://feedback.autodesk.com. That's the main portal for all the beta programs for Autodesk, not just AutoCAD. Then you click on AutoCAD Customer Council Opportunity.

I also have a QR code you can scan. Pick up your phone, open up your camera app, and then point it at it and it will take the picture and then it takes you to the sign up page. Also, when you're on the page, you can click on the Customer Council Opportunity, and that will do the same thing. How to help influence the next AutoCAD.

First, a little caveat about these bears. When we were in Haines, Alaska, we took the-- and as we came around the corner, these bears were standing like this. Well, I was a wrestling coach for many years here in Northern California, and these guys looked like seasoned wrestling pros for a high school wrestling team. They were doing duck hunters and takedowns, and the guide told us they were probably siblings. And it was pretty cool. And then we sat there for quite a while watching them, and I realized that my camera could also take video. So I did take a little video of them. But anyway, just a side note.

The first thing you want to do is sign up. That's the most important thing. So you either come see me later or use the links in the presentation, but it's important to sign up. That way you can get into the program and see how it works. Download the Alpha or Beta. That way you can get it on your computer. Then take a look at the readme.

The reason that's important is the readme contains all the information about the Alpha or the Beta or whatever it is that we're asking for feedback on, including installation instructions, uninstallation instructions, also new features. Specifically in Alphas, everything goes into the readme so you can see what the new features are and what their state is or how ready they are to be looked at and share feedback with. You can also run AutoCAD in your browser.

So for example, maybe you work for a company where you're not an administrator on your computer, but you want to take a look at this and share feedback in the AutoCAD customer account. So you can pick the Run AutoCAD In Browser button and it will launch AutoCAD based on a group of regions in your area. It's a great way to share feedback. You can also upload your own files to give them a try. And you don't have to worry about the files being up there for anyone to look at. They're only available for you.

And once you finish the session, those files will go away and not be visibly. So for example, if you signed in today and ran AutoCAD in your browser and you come back tomorrow, whatever you uploaded, it won't be there. It's gone already. The downside to running it into your browser is if some of the features that you're looking at are performance based, it's a little difficult to see that when you're running in a hosted environment.

Very key feature here. Red asterisk. Try all the new features. That's one of the most important parts about our Alpha/Beta program. Sometimes you don't think you need to try these new features because maybe you're not going to use them in your environment. But, for example, if you're a new user and you don't have a lot of experience in AutoCAD, you're going to let us know right away how it flows and how it works. Is it working OK? Am I getting it? Do I understand how it works? Or no, this is terrible. I can't figure it out. And the teams can react to that.

Also, if you're an experienced user, you can say, yeah, I don't think I would use this feature every day in my day to day because of the industry I'm in. But I like the fact that it adheres to all the standards of the other features, so it works the same. So if someone in my team does want to use it, because they do work that way, I'm going to be able to better support them. And these are things you can share with us by looking at all the new features. Very important.

Share early feedback. Part of the reason we do the Alpha program is we want to get you in there early and let you share feedback with us about how things are working. The earlier you share the feedback with us, the more chance we can react. What was happening before we added Alpha to the product was we'd be in the Beta cycle, maybe halfway through, and people would want to see some pretty significant changes. Well, the code is pretty far along and it's very difficult to make those changes at that point. Kind of like rebuilding half the building when the foundation's poured and the framing is all in place.

So with the Alpha program, you can share that feedback. It's getting to the teams early and they can react to it much better than they can later in the cycle. Share feature requests. Say you're working on one of these new features and you think of something that would be a little easier, a little better workflow in the future, or an added feature to it. You can create a feature request and share that with the team.

Or perhaps you want to work on a-- you've got an idea for a brand new feature, something that you think everybody would love to use. You can also create that. The other thing I suggest is search the feature requests, see what's available, and vote for them. If you have something up there that matches what you're looking for, take a quick minute and vote for it, because the more people that vote for it, the more chance that the product managers are going to want to take a look at it and see if it's something they can add in the future.

Create problem reports for new features. This is kind of key. When we're in the Alpha stage, we ask you not to create the problem reports because the features aren't ready yet. They're pretty early in the cycle and there are going to be issues, but they're known issues and they're expected issues. But sometimes there is an issue that comes up that you trip on. So what we ask is that you post in the forum and then what will happen is, for example, one of our testers were working on some 3D features and found an issue and he posted the question.

The developer said, oh, yeah, that's definitely a bug. Please log that in the Customer Council. And he pushed back. He said, well, Bud says not to log bug reports this early in the cycle. And so I jumped in and said, it's OK to log the bugs when one of the team members asks you to. We just don't want to log everything like we do when we get to Beta. And so he logged it and everybody was very happy.

And then take all the surveys. Surveys are probably one of the biggest ways for you to get your voice heard by the majority of the teams. We share these surveys. What happens is, after you take the surveys, I will create a report and I'll share that report out with all the teams. So the designer, the product managers, the engineers, the developers.

Everyone takes a look at the results and sees how, as a collective, people are reacting to these new features and what they think of them. They also look at the individual comments that you'll put in the surveys. So take all the surveys. The other thing is there's-- and we realize it's a lot of time to be a Beta site. It's not easy to do all this stuff all the time. So sign up. That's first. You can't do anything until you're in the program.

Try the new features, even if you're using the browser version, just to take a quick look and do a quick check out of these new features just to get an idea of what they are, and then take the surveys. Because now that you've looked at the features, your survey responses are going to make more sense, and it leaves a better message for the teams on why you do or don't like certain things in the surveys.

Learn what the AutoCAD Customer Council is. Alphas and Betas run year round. We Alpha test AutoCAD. Beta Test AutoCAD and toolsets. The reason I say Alpha test AutoCAD and Beta test AutoCAD and toolsets is not all the toolsets, which would be like AutoCAD Map, AutoCAD MEP, AutoCAD Plant, electrical architecture, all those different programs--

[CLEARS THROAT]

Excuse me. They don't always run Alphas, and they're usually a little bit behind the AutoCAD team. But they're all built on top of AutoCAD, so we ask everyone to look at the AutoCAD Alphas. And then as we get into the Betas, you can look at more of the specifics. For example, if you're an AutoCAD Electrical user, you might want to look at the AutoCAD Electrical Beta as we get farther along. Beta test web and mobile when available. We talked about that earlier.

The Beta tests are specific, usually driven by a feature set they're working on where they need some quick validation. It's more about validation with the web and mobile at this point. And then Beta test updates. That's another thing we do quite a bit of. So after, for example, AutoCAD 2025 shipped, and then after a while, you start using the product and the systems, you run into a problem. So I suggest you don't report the problem to the Beta, your problem.

And the reason for that is product support is taking all this from people all over that are using the new version and they're putting them in buckets. So if a bunch of people are logging a problem on a very specific issue, that gets bucketed and it gets escalated back to the AutoCAD team and they know if, A, they need to do a hotfix, or they need to put this into the update. So it takes a couple months, gets everything ready, then we put the update out there. Then you test that and make sure everything is working. It's more about making sure everything's stable and not causing regressions in some of your other features.

Run surveys for multiple teams. We do a lot of surveys in the AutoCAD team. In fact, the last couple years, we've probably done a little bit too many surveys. We've been trying to pull back. This year for the Alpha season, we've done one survey. Normally we've run three by now. We do surveys for the AutoCAD team. That can be for multiple people in the AutoCAD team, including me. I will create a survey.

For example, we were looking for people that use Autodesk Docs, and I'll create a survey that says, hey, are you currently using Autodesk Docs? So that you say yes to that, and then when the team comes back and say, we have a new feature, but it works in parallel with Autodesk Docs. Can you take a look at that and get us some people to take a look at this new feature? And that's how we reach out to specific people during the Beta cycle and the Alpha cycle.

The design team does a lot of surveys as well. And I will share those surveys with everyone. These are very popular because a lot of times what they're looking for is the new design they're working on, they want to see what you think about, should it do A, should it do B. And they're really high level and quick and, again, a great way to influence the next version of AutoCAD.

And then the surveys for product management. And product management, they're the ones that create the feature set each year for our product. So those surveys go directly to those teams and they have a lot to say about what is picked to be in the next version of AutoCAD. So you're swaying them with your opinion when you make sure you take those surveys.

Centercode. You've heard me mention Centercode a couple times. That is the tool we use to run the Beta program. It's kind of an operating system. So it's a website. Feedback.autodesk.com. And all the Autodesk Beta cycles are up there, or Beta programs are up there. So you can go in and do, for example, the AutoCAD Customer Council, and it's segmented in its own group.

Let me get caught up here. So the tool is how we run the Beta. So it's what allows us to do things like put the downloads up there. So when you go up there to see the next version of AutoCAD or maybe it's a hotfix, maybe it's an update, maybe it's a utility. I have a Beta going right now for a utility that the team is very excited about, and actually, the Beta members are very excited about it as well. So Centercode that allows us to do this.

We used to put everything on something called Akamai, which took a lot of time to get it up there, get the permissions right and then download it. And Centercode gave us the ability to do the uploads direct. It just saves a lot of time on our end. Forums. It also allows us to create the forums. I can create any type of forum I need for an Alpha or a Beta. For example, I created a special utility forum or tools forum for the utility we're Beta testing right now so that when you go in to look at that, it's easy to find the forum and share your feedback and get that feedback in front of the team.

The surveys. Centercode has a great survey program. It's actually my favorite and the reason I like it over-- we use another program called Qualtrics. And the reason I like the Centercode surveys over the Qualtrics surveys is I can filter the results. So say the AutoCAD product managers were asking some specific stuff about new features that they're considering for the next release. People say yes or no, they like it, and they may have comments.

And I'll get asked by the product managers, hey, can we pinpoint the people that said yes to this feature and ask them more questions. And so I can use a filter in Centercode to send another survey, or we can reach out through email and say, hey, we want to hear more from you. Are you OK to set up a Zoom call or something like that to share feedback?

The other tool we use is called Qualtrics, which it's a great survey tool as well. The downside to that is I can't filter anything. So a lot of times what happens is they ask you a lot of redundant questions that we already know in the Customer Council because we can't create a filter to say, we already know this about you because you're in our program. So whenever the teams want to do surveys, I ask them to use Centercode for the surveys, but they both work great.

Reports. Reports are very important. Not so much on your side but our side. And what makes them important is when you take that report or that survey and it shows the results of the combined people that have taken the survey, it helps to rate it and show us what features you liked or didn't like and why you did or did not like those features and any other feedback that you've shared in through comments.

I can also create these reports specifically. Say we're looking for feedback from larger companies. I can use a filter to say, show me the results of all the surveys from people in a company with 500 or more employees in it. And we do find that changes the tone of the results of the survey, especially if you're working on something that's more and more important to larger companies.

And in some cases, it's the opposite. It's more important to smaller companies. We have a lot of 1 to 100 employees that people work at that are in the Centercode and then all in between. So it's just a great way to share this information. And what makes it good for you and the reason you want to hear about this is it helps get your feedback in front of all the right people. And then if they have other questions, we can reach out to you for more feedback on that.

Problem reports. These are pretty cool as well. So say you hit an issue. Maybe you're trying to install the latest beta, we'll say, and you hit an error code. We'll say you hit error code 1, and you don't know what to do and I don't know what to do. So I take your problem report and I push it into our internal system called Jira, and then I push it under our install feature. And the team will reach back out to you, ask you for the log files, and start figuring out what happens.

What's great about the problem reports is anything that's logged through there that gets pushed through, it doesn't fall through the cracks because it's in the system now and there's no way that we miss it to figure out that problem. Which is great for us as well, because then we don't ship with something that you guys found during our Alpha or Beta cycle. And the downside of the problem reports in Centercode, it's not a two way communication.

So I have to go back through all the problem reports or the Jira tags and then I'll update the problem reports. And usually it's during the Alpha cycle I do that. When we get into Beta, it's difficult. But at any time, if someone has a question about something that they logged, they can also ask and then I'll just go in and look it up and then I'll update the internal problem report from Centercode.

Feature requests. Same thing. That is fully automated because anything that you put in a feature request goes straight into our Jira bucket for new features in the future, possible new features in the future, and the teams share those with the product managers, for example. They're the main ones. They pick something that we call customer delights. We put these in. Every year, we have customer delighters in the product. Some years, we put more emphasis on these because they're outwardly kind of like an express tool.

So it could be a feature that's enhancing an existing feature or it's a new small feature that just makes things easier to use. And sometimes it's underneath, it's in the infrastructure of our code. So you don't see it, but it's these little enhancements that are making things better for you. And then we don't typically publicize those as much. But all of this comes from this feature request Jira bucket, but it doesn't always come back into Centercode so that you can tell that it's, for example, something that maybe one of you created a feature request for that made it into the product.

But the majority of these that make it into AutoCAD come from the Customer Council because we're the biggest group sending in reports to this bucket. But support also gets these as well and they put them in there. This is the AutoCAD Customer Council. This is what it looks like when you first sign in, and you can see AutoCAD Customer Council is a dropdown. We have activities and feedback, and then the little bug symbol is for bugs and the light bulb is for ideas. And then this is a landing page.

The dropdown. So this is what you see. There's the Run AutoCAD In Browser I talked about. There's also I put up a section called Alpha/Beta Features. That's where you can watch videos on new features, get an idea of what they're doing so that when you take a look at them on your side, you can have a better idea of how to use them and how they work. Serial numbers for installing the product, the downloads. And then you'll see we have electrical and plant in there. That means they currently have an Alpha that's available.

And then our guidelines. Autodesk feedback. GitHub for LISP. That was from a previous project. And then feedback. That's how you get to the forums and also how you get to the problem reports and the feature requests. And then I have AutoCAD Web, and that shows you some stuff about web when we're doing an Alpha or Beta on that. And then opt out of a project if you want to leave. And then activities. Most of these are surveys, as you can see.

So there's a Doc survey. We're asking if you're using Autodesk Docs, and a LISP survey we want to know. And then that hackathon thing there will make more sense in a couple minutes when we get to the next slide. And then we're looking for help. That is something coming from our design team that's future looking. And that's a Qualtrics survey there. And Then the last part is feedback. So problem reports, feature requests, and the user forums.

And that is what Centercode is. It's just a tool that allows us-- it's like a huge database as well. So it gathers all this information and I can create filters to sort this information. I can create reports and share this back to the teams. It helps us better understand what you're sharing with us and what you want to see in the future.

Hackathon. You saw me talking about that a minute ago. What is the hackathon? My boss and I were in Louisiana for AU and we were standing around the Autodesk or the AutoCAD answer booth, answer bar. And we were talking and he said, hey, we do this hackathon every year. What do you think if we make this available for our Alpha program?

And I got really excited about this. Yeah, this is great, because Beta has been over for a little bit. We've had a couple months of smaller projects that are going on. It'll be the first look at the next version of AutoCAD, but it's also the first look at some very specific stuff that you guys never get to see and don't even know about.

What the hackathon is is the internal teams, after we ship, before we start working heads down on the next version of AutoCAD, teams get together and come up with ideas of features they'd like to see in AutoCAD. And some of these guys used to use AutoCAD, so they're all excited, and they'll create a utility. For example, some of the guys work on the performance team. So the last two hackathons, performance was the top feature that people liked in the hackathon. And that'll make more sense in a minute.

This year was our eighth internal hackathon. Also when they get together-- so they're not always programmers. Sometimes they're designers, sometimes they're programmers, sometimes they're product managers, and sometimes the internal part of the hackathon, no code is written. It's more of a concept or an idea. And what they're trying to do is talk our product management team into adding this new concept into the product.

And by having the hackathon out there, we get you to validate these features and actually enhance them by ideas of what you'd like to-- excuse me, what you'd like to see in these features if they were to be put into the product. So that safe harbor statement, that kind of applies here during the Alpha/Beta because two, maybe three of these, make it into the Alpha-- or make it into the product each year. It's also the first Alpha of the season.

And what is really nice about it is when we put this out, everyone-- and this was our second year. People get super excited about it, and we see a big upsurge in people coming into the Customer Council, because that's another statistic I can see is how many people come in each day. They'll start looking at it, they download it, and they share feedback with us. Feature teams that want to create them and put them in the product. We talked about that a little bit. We ask the Alpha sites to vote on their favorite hackathon feature.

Now, my boss had another great idea on this one. He goes, let's make this real simple. Let's break it into three possible solutions. And I'm paraphrasing here, so. I can't live without it. That's the first one. I already have a way to do this. And the third one was no thanks, I don't need this one at all. And so what we asked the Alpha sites to do was go to the forums for the feature that you can't live without and let them know you can't live without it.

And that gets the dialogue going. And that's where the people that created the hackathon features are going back and forth with you in real time collaboration, talking about these very early possible features. And it's really exciting on both sides because you're seeing what we go through internally when we create or design a new feature, except you're involved from the very beginning.

Post that feedback in the forums. Take a survey voting for your top three hackathon features. So what's nice about that is I create the survey and it looks just like the three choices I gave you, and it echoes each new feature. There might be seven or eight features in the hackathon, and so we want you to pick your top three. So what you're basically doing is voting on what your top three are.

We take that and we create a report or I create a report, and I share that on the hackathon Slack channel. We use Slack internally for stuff like this because these are teams all over the world that are working on this. And we share that feedback and we ask the teams to look at it and see if they have any questions, but it breaks it down by what is your favorite feature. So we can see right away what the top three favorite features are.

And we can't always get everything in, but I think the last two years, we've been able to get at least two of these features into the product. So it's been very exciting for everyone as part of the Alpha program. And like I said, it sets the tempo for the Alpha. It's kind of fun because I'm a statistics kind of guy and I use the filter so I can see how many people download the Alpha, because sometimes we aren't able to get the hackathon Alpha into the browser for people to look at. So most of these people are downloading it and installing it on their machine.

And we use a tool called MSIX from Microsoft, which creates the installer and treats AutoCAD as an app versus a product, how it's created when we ship. And what that does is that protects you in the Alpha from having problems if you are in a side by side situation between AutoCAD shipping and AutoCAD Alpha. The caveat there is if we've made a change to or we've picked up a component from one of the other teams, for example, identity or licensing or the installer itself, those are components that run inside of every product that gets installed at Autodesk.

So those components could upgrade the shipping version, but that's really not a problem, because those teams are going to upgrade you at some point anyway, and before we ship, all those will be upgraded. So we've never seen a problem because of that. And MSIX has made the Alphas so much more stable as compared to the early days when we did Alphas. A story I like to tell is I was a customer. I was invited to Autodesk in San Rafael.

I went to the Copper Top, which was one of the buildings they were in, and I get in this conference room with about 20 other customers like myself, and they have us look at things. Well, they were working on the ACIS solid modeler. And I sit down and I have a developer sitting to my left. And so they paired you up. So every customer had an Autodesk employee and they had look at these features. Well, I worked for a power utility and we had steam lines, and then we also had a lot of my drawings were below the surface showing the steam entries.

So I'm looking at this thing and I create a circle and I rotate it. I offset the circle by a small amount. Then I create a 3D polyline and put some bends in it. Then I extrude the two circles along the polyline and then I subtract the center. And then I rendered it. And I had what looked like a steam pipe. This poor developer, he was so excited. He didn't know what to do. And I said, it's OK, I'll save it. He goes, that's not hooked up yet. I go, I'll print it. And he goes, that's not hooked up yet.

He says, I have to run upstairs and get someone to come down here and see it. Well, of course, the Alpha crashed and the guy never got to share it. That just shows you the difference between an Alpha then and an Alpha now. An Alpha now is pretty close to as stable as a shipping product. There are some things that aren't ready yet, but that's why we ask you to concentrate on it.

Gold Program. Now, this is exciting. This is another way for you to help influence the next version of AutoCAD. We identify a select group of Beta sites and ask them if they want to help with our Gold Program. So what I do is I watch-- I spend every day in Centercode watching everything you guys are doing, replying, and going back and forth. And then I look at the statistics and I see people that are very active and that want to help influence the next AutoCAD.

And we have maybe 17 people in our Gold Program. And we asked those people to put it in production and use it daily. I think I mentioned earlier. So when I was a customer, I was a Gold site, so I knew this program very well. And I've been in part of this program since 1997 on the Autodesk side as well. And back then we used to do Civil sites.

Once they put it in production, what that does is it allows you to use the current version the way you work every day. And because you're a Gold site, if you hit an issue that stops you from being able to work in production with the Beta-- and we don't do this till Beta-- then the development team will identify the issue as quickly as possible and resolve it and give you an update so you can keep working. If that's not possible, you'll have to step back to the shipping version of AutoCAD and work on that until we resolve it for you. But it's a great way for us to get real world experience using the new features.

And as a Gold site, you also get help from the team about these features while you're trying to use them. The Gold sites meet weekly with their Autodesk host and talk about how AutoCAD is working. And what we do, or I do-- I run the Gold Program-- is I pair you up, sometimes it's a product manager, sometimes it's a director, sometimes it's a designer, and sometimes it's a couple of each or it's a QA engineer. But we try to get new hosts with experienced hosts so that you guys always get the best experience if you're picked as a Gold site.

And then during that meeting, we ask you, have you used any of the new features? And a lot of times we hear, well, I've used these, but this one, I'm not sure how I can use it in my environment. And that's when we ask you to take a look at it and use it as a-- what's the word I'm looking for? To take a look at it and use it to see how it works and let us know why you don't think you can use it. And also, does it look more like the other features using an AutoCAD? Does it fit your standards in your company?

And then in some cases, you'll say, hey, I'm starting a new project next week. I have this one Gold site I've been working with for a couple years now. He says, you know what? The stuff I'm doing next week, I think this feature will work for that. I'll be able to give you some great feedback on that. So that's pretty common. And then the other thing we do is we capture all the bugs with a gold colon in front of it in the summary line and I run a report, and we share that report with everyone.

So each team, when you meet with the Gold site, will go over those bugs and about what the status is. And then we get an idea from you, is this bug important or is this something that's been going on for a while that you could live without? You'd rather have us spend more time working on this over here, or is this a must fix for you? And that's another way we get great feedback from you. That's the problem reports. Like I said, we need you to try all the new features and how they're working, especially in a production environment. You really get great feedback that way.

Also the Gold sites will take every survey. And again, we've talked about that. The advantage of the surveys is the more people that take the surveys, the better we see the results. Also, the Gold sites get an additional survey at the end that is specifically about the Gold Program. It asks them how the Gold Program went, how it went with their hosts. And I usually create a spreadsheet for this. And then it's typically the last meeting with the Gold sites that we go through them and then we type in all the answers to their survey.

And then the other thing is it also gives us a pulse of, are we ready to ship? Because we have what we call a release candidate at this state. So it's pretty close to being ready. Most of everything is fixed in that version of AutoCAD in the beta program at this point. And they'll tell us. We ask them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, and in most cases, we get a 9 or a 10, sometimes an 8 if there's a feature that's giving you a hard time. And that's also great.

And then if the rating is a little low, we ask them to explain why the rating is low, because that allows us to go back to the teams and say, this is what caused the rating to be low from this team. We're never upset about a low rating from a Gold site because it's letting us know somewhere where we need to do a little better. How else can you help influence AutoCAD?

Side note on my picture over here. This is a whale tail. This is in Hoonah, Alaska. On this particular cruise, I saw one-- I didn't see it. My wife saw it. One breaching whale, which is where they jump straight up out of the water and then crash down. That's a lot of whale tails, a lot of whales going sideways, clearing the blowhole. But that was about it. But pretty cool whale tails. And apparently they're all unique and they tag them, in many cases, and know who these whales are.

Inside the Factory. OK. Inside the Factory is something brand new for the AutoCAD team. And I'm on a core team. We're just getting started with this. It's something that the Revit and Inventor team have been doing for a long time. In fact, my friend Chris from the Revit-- or from the Inventor team, he's been doing this for over 20 years now. And we're going to go a little bit more into detail on that in a minute.

And the other one-- and this is brand new, hot off the presses. It's another thing to keep your eye out for. And if you do join the AutoCAD Customer Council, you'll definitely hear from me about this when it comes available. It's called it's AutoCAD CAB. It'll be a little bit more frequent than Inside the Factory, and it's another way to identify customers with a lot of passion toward our product that we can bounce ideas off you, you can bounce ideas off us, and we can get a really good idea about what we're looking at in the next version of AutoCAD.

So Inside the Factory. I just got this slide this morning, so it just made it into my deck. So it's an event-- and there's actually going to be two of them based on time zones, because we tried to get it all to fit into one time zone. That just doesn't work. We have too many customers worldwide these days. When I first joined Autodesk in '97, we had a thousand employees and everything was here in the US. Now it's all over the world. It's amazing to see the difference. It's crazy but very cool at the same time.

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