[CLOSED] Feedback on Fusion Team and Data Management

[jason.swetzoff]

Hi, I'm a Senior UX Designer on the Data Management team for Fusion 360 and would love to get some general feedback from the F360 community on and around Fusion 360. 

• Do you currently use Fusion Team?
  • If not, why not?
    • What do you use instead?
    • What features or improvements would convince you to use Team?
  • If you do, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with Fusion Team?
    • What’s most confusing or annoying about Fusion Team?
    • Which things do you like best about Fusion Team?
    • What do you wish you could do in Team that you can’t do today?

Thanks, I look forward to hearing from you!

[robpicinic]

Hey Jason,

Long time user of Fusion 360 and Inventor/Vault/etc.

I suppose the biggest issue I personally have with Fusion Team as that there is two types. One free that is more for personal space storage, and one that is paid. (but I suppose the paid part is now free?.....still confused)

the other major issue is that Fusion Team is not a Vault. As in it does not lock down files from others being able to edit.

No check in/out functionality.

A true data management system that works well in a manufacturing company is that their files are protected from overwriting each other

Revision control would also be great to have, and while i'm at it......BOM 
a true BOM

Basically Vault Pro in the cloud.....but called Fusion Team.

I hope that sums it up.

[maruska]

We would like to have a bit more user control. We work with a variety of contractors and free-lancers, so it would be nice to be able to see (at the dashboard level) what projects they have access to and be able to remove them from projects without having to dig into every project individually.

We'd also like to be able to change ownership of a project. We have projects from past employees that we'd like to assign new ownership to. It's largely semantics, but being able to do some sort of CHOWN on a project would be nice.

EDIT: We also would like the option to disassociate users from projects when they are deactivated. When a user is deactivated currently, if they are reactivated, they have access to old projects again. We'd rather reassign them access on a per project basis if they leave and come back.

[edgemarston]

I would love to use Fusion Team, but I've read all the support materials and how-tos and I still can't get my data ported over to it. Either there's a weird bug happening or the UI for getting set up is extremely counterintuitive and confusing. Not sure which 🙂

[jeff.pek]

@edgemarston : Can you elaborate a little more on the problems you're having? What are you trying? What's (not) working?

Thanks,

  Jeff

[Anonymous]

This Rob!  No documentation what the differences are between paid and free/commercial fusion 360 license I need move my data over and move stuff around in and out projects cant do it so its mess!

[Swarfmaker]

Following on from questions that I have asked on the support forum, moving from the old 'startup' license to the new 'personal' license, ensures that we can no longer use the team facilities and capabilities. That is a serious loss for  those on the old 'startup' license and a loss of utility of which we were all inadequately forewarned. A very bad move on the part of Autodesk and a break of trust for those of us who have been assisting with F360 development from the very beginning. We also lose access to some of the file translators, so all in all, a very disrespectful outcome.

[jason.swetzoff]

I'm sorry to hear that there is some confusion around the new Fusion 360 subscription types. You can get a bit more information on that here: https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/subscription-types/. There are also some active conversations going on in the comments of this page that might be able to address some of the subscription type concerns better than I can.

[maruska]

Yeah - the new subscription types are pretty sad.

We have 10 commercial seats for our studio - but we wouldn't have any if I weren't playing around with a startup/hobby license years ago. The Swiss Army knife aspect of Fusion is what sold our team on it as we deal with so many data types. That's something that another designer will completely miss if only using the new Personal type.

I personally wouldn't qualify for the new Startup license because a) I'm not incorporated or LLC, and b) I don't work a a single venture capital-funded product.

I'm less concerned by the data management side of things for individual users because I imagine they are working in smaller teams, or with with less complex data needs - but neutering the core offering seems like a miss.

[jason.swetzoff]

@robpicinic Thanks for the feedback. I admittedly need to learn more about Vault from the Inventor team which I plan on doing in the next few weeks. I think you are right, there are some valuable lessons and knowledge we can learn from Vault. I don't think we will ever be Vault pro but that doesn't mean we aren't working on ways to address some of the issues or ideas you brought up. We are always working to become a more powerful data management system.

[Swarfmaker]

Thanks Jason. This post was not about confusion - although there is plenty of that.

It is about the fact that according to the clarification received earlier, 'personal' licenses will not allow team working. This is a major step away from the team capability enjoyed under the old 'startup' license.

So, not confusion but complaint. I thought that this would be a good place to make this clear as it seems that not all of the F360 team members were aware of this licensing restriction.

[maruska]

@Swarfmaker 👍

[jason.swetzoff]

@maruska This is really good feedback. Thanks!

I may be misunderstanding you but I believe you can change who is the admin of a project if the person who was the project admin has left. However, you do have to be a Team Admin. To do this go to your account drop-down (where your profile picture goes) and click on the "Admin" link which will be next to the "Settings" link. Then go to the "Projects" tab. This is also a good place to see who is a member of what project.

[maruska]

@jason.swetzoff for sure, admin rights can be assigned - you can have multiple admins even. But here's a scenario we've run into (frequently)...

We inherit a Fusion project from an outside vendor (or one that was created by an ex-employee). The project was created by say User1.

If we deactivate User1, the project will show in the project list as not having an owner/creator. If User1 is reactivated, they automatically re-inherit that project. We'd like to be able to just reassign ownership - and remove User1's de facto right to be admin as the project's "creator".

The best way we've found to solve this is to have User2 make a new project. Move all the data to the new project (not copy - because we lose the version history otherwise). Then we archive the original project (which is now empty) and then delete it (because we can only delete archived projects). This effectively removes User1 from the project and makes User2 the owner/creator/admin...

EDIT: This assumes that User1 is still involved in other projects and can't be totally deactivated as a Teams member.

To be fair - we also use Google's G-suite - which isn't much better from an admin standpoint. Legacy ownership is a problem there too.

[tomGKJVK]

The biggest problem we have with data management is the ability to move files.   This is in a manufacturing environment.  

I'm trying to setup a workflow with a "Current Production" and "Completed Production"  project/folder that is visible to my employees.    The Current Production project contains everything in-process or pending.  As a part is completed, they move it to Completed Production.  I then go through Completed Production and move those files to customer/job organized projects so we can find them quickly later.   My employees do not have access to those customer projects.     When that job comes back around, I can easily find and move the file back to Current Production.

This way employees only have access to files they need, and they're all in one place rather than having to search for them.

But, the files often get stuck and cannot be moved.   Either it says the file is in use, even though it is not.  Or, if they create a drawing from a file then neither the model nor the drawing can be moved because they reference each other.    We are forced to save the drawing as a PDF and then delete it in Fusion -then we can move the model file.  But that means if we need to make a change to that drawing next time the job comes in, we have to completely recreate it.

I would love a better way to do this that accomplishes the same goal.

I should mention - we've been doing this outside of Fusion Team by sharing projects between seats.   I've been exploring Fusion Team today - I don't see any benefits to it for our workflow.  It doesn't allow me to put current production files all in one place and then file them back away when complete.  Team also makes all projects visible, even if a member doesn't have access to it.       I don't see a way to hide them.  

[Anonymous]

I have a fusion team created by mistake. I was in search of the delete option to it. But i didn't find any such option in  the hub.

So my  request to the fusion team creators is, please priovide a delete option for deletin the team by the admin.

[jason.swetzoff]

Sorry for the late replies, I've been busy and took a vacation. 

@maruska Thanks for the continued feedback. This good to know as we try to get user management and admin management improvements prioritized.

@tomGKJVK Thanks for the reply and the great feedback. It's really helpful when I am having conversations with my team and PM's on knowing what improvements to make next. It's also really cool to hear a bit about your workflow. I'm also sorry your files are getting stuck, I'll try to look into why that is happening. 

@Anonymous Thanks, this is a good suggestion and will make sure this is known as a needed feature. 

[Anonymous]

I just had the new update install to my system, it seems to have lost a lot of the features it had before, a lot of functionality is missing and it is more difficult to use. I am currently trying to restore back to the old version. I am very disappointed with the new version of fusion 360.

[maruska]

It seems like as an admin, there are two basic things I need to manage: users and content. I basically need a view into each: what users have access to what, and what content is available to whom.

From there, I need to be able to control what’s in each of these views.

Content has a couple of strata as well, since members can be added at a project level, but then there’s also the ability to share individual file links. Having a kill switch for linking would also be great.

We can’t use Fusion for any ITAR related projects (because of the cloud), but that is generally the lens we put on things.

J.

[PinRudolf]

I would like to have the option to step down from a team.

Currently when a project is shared from an 'old' account I will not be added to that team and see the project in my personal folder. But having someone share a project from a new account means I will be added to their team as well. That's fine but if it is a temporary share I would like to step out of the team at a later point.

The inconsistency between new and old accounts causes confusion as I will not be able to predict where the project will show up.

We used to be able to work with multiple people in one document which led to loss of work, but I have not tested that recently. Was not a big fan of that. Might have been solved already?

Fusion is famed (by my clients and me anyway) for it's easy to use file sharing system. So keep it up and a big thanks to the team!