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New features in Autodesk Fusion bring added flexibility for teams by providing more granular controls, new and enhanced roles, and group management, allowing for tailored control over design data.

What are Autodesk Fusion projects?

Autodesk Fusion projects are digital workspaces where teams can work together on designs. Imagine them as shared folders on your computer, but supercharged for the needs of design and manufacturing.

Within a Fusion project, members can store and work on all kinds of design files, such as 3D models, drawings, and all other non-3D design data, such as PDFs, Word files, and images. Design files are often referenced to other designs and assemblies. Fusion projects handle all these references and changes behind the scenes, so teams can focus on their work without getting bogged down by managing and sharing files.

Ultimately, Fusion projects make collaboration simple and efficient, so teams can focus on their creativity and productivity.

What’s new in Autodesk Fusion projects?

As Fusion keeps growing, our plan is to keep it simple while adding more choices to support bigger teams and projects with specific access needs. Currently, we have three project types to manage users at the project level – Open, Closed, and Secret projects. We’re now introducing a new project type that offers everything the earlier project types allow, and more!

The new enhancements include:

Granular access control

Now, you can assign roles to both members and groups at different levels: project, folder, and even subfolder. For instance, you can designate someone as a viewer at the project level to safeguard crucial data, while giving them the editor role within a specific subfolder, allowing them to make design edits.

Enhanced roles

We’ve improved and added new roles so team members have just the right level of access.

• Viewer role (Improved!): We have improved our viewer role to permit members to see projects in Fusion, while still protecting the contents from being downloaded.
• Reader role (New!): A brand new role allowing administrators to protect important data from being updated. This new role permits users to open, access and reference data. Securely referencing important designs and frequently used parts is an example of applying the reader role to a user or group.
• Manager (New!): This new role permits a member to manage users without having full admin privileges to permanently delete files. This permission was combined with the previous project admin role.

Groups

Save time by managing your members with groups, a set of members who share a specific responsibility or task. We have heard everyone’s feedback on providing an easier way to assign roles to many team members at once.  No longer do you have to manage roles for every member.  You can create your own groups, add users, and assign a role.  All new groups created can be used hub wide.You can quickly assign permissions and manage access for multiple people at once.

Applications and benefits of Autodesk Fusion projects

Here are a few common use cases on how our new Autodesk Fusion projects help empower you and your teams:

Data re-use

Designs often incorporate standard components recycled from prior projects. When collaborating with large teams, maintaining the accuracy of the content and preventing unintentional modifications becomes a top priority. By utilizing folder permissions and the read-only role, you can create dedicated folders for critical data. This ensures that teams can access the correct models without the risk of unintentional changes.

With new groups, you can define groups within your team and quickly apply roles to projects as they arise. This approach keeps the simplicity and power of Fusion projects while removing tedious tasks of managing individual members – improving standards and more effectively re-using data.

Suppliers and subcontractors

Design work is increasingly collaborative, involving multiple teams and companies. Lead design teams often engage subcontractors and suppliers for various aspects of a project. In these cases, you may need selective access control, where you grant certain users editing privileges for specific subassemblies while restricting them from viewing the rest of the model.

 Permissions were traditionally set at the project level only. This changes with the introduction of folder permissions. Now, it is possible to allocate work areas to each supplier or subcontractor without compromising access to the entire project. Extended team members can easily reference models and contribute new designs within the folders and sub-solders where access has been assigned, without gaining visibility into the work of others. This enhancement retains the power and simplicity of Fusion while enabling larger teams navigating complex collaboration and organizational structures.

Classroom instruction

Fusion is popular among universities for classroom instruction. Every semester, instructors’ welcome new classes and set them up with course materials, templates, assignments, and collaborative spaces. With large classes that frequently change, instructors seek simple methods to invite many students while quickly managing access to materials. Instructors need to distribute assignments to students simultaneously, allowing access to materials in a controlled environment where they can work independently without viewing the work of others.

The combination of Fusion’s projects with the more granular folder access controls, expanded roles, and group management features make classwork. Typically, instructors create a project for each class, configuring it so that every student can access read-only course materials and have control over their designated folder for individual work. Group management makes it easy for instructors to invite many new students each semester while maintaining consistency in content and structure across classes.

How does my team take advantage of the new enhanced Fusion projects?

Enhanced projects will be available very soon. Once available, you will be notified in Fusion, and you’ll be able to upgrade your legacy projects to our enhanced projects. If you’d like to learn more about how this upgrade process will work, you can learn more in our Help documentation.