Cloud and Online Work

Anonymous · ‎11-26-2013

While I embrace the idea of cloud based data hubs for many of their obvious advantages I 'd like to point out some major shortcomings of this concept:

1. Data integrity

While my data is uploaded to the hub data integrity can be affected by server or network faults - so a local copy is needed that does not erase itself and is hidden away somewhere deep in a more or less hidden folder structure.

better idea: sync local and hub data in the background for selected data sets only

2. App usability

Working with confidential customer data is not possible because upload of intellectual property of a customer (or your employer) to a third party server is usually illegal or strongly prohibited. This limits the use of Fusion360 drastically for me. I must proof that protected data has no chance to get beyond the allowed realm. Practically this makes Fusion360 a no go if I have no proper control about what data goes where.

When working with data sets of clients usually during a meeting where options are discussed and decisions are made based on an available data model the use of Fusion360 is very limited if not useless, because of the long loop to upload and afterwards download data in order to get it rendered. Not to mention the lack of an internetaccess for guests through a companies LAN, which is basically scarce at best in these situations if not totally prohibited.

And at the usual limited bandwidth a normal upload/dowload cycle of a mildly complex construction takes what? 10 minutes? 1 hour? Through a cell-phone connection 2 days? A bit long compared to 1 second opening the data locally.

better idea: transparent access to local data without a forced round trip through the internet

srinath_jonnalagadda · ‎03-27-2015

Luke, Please note my point about translators in client; I.e. STEP and SAT import in offline mode. The short answer is yes it is something we will consider. The place we draw the line is 100% offline mode (first point). Cheers, -srinath

cekuhnen · ‎03-27-2015

Srinath,

At the end this is your product but I think in this thread as others there are many reasons why to re-consider the statement that you draw a line with the off-line mode. I personaly already experienced situations where for days was unusable. Thats the truth - when you cannot access your files in the cloud when the servers are down. Now this situation hardly happens but sofar was the case 3 times for me in the past year.

As I personally stated the A360 I see as a nice online data management tool a central storage unite. No matter if my house burns down my work is still there. And that is fantastic.

However as with every good software that offers cloud sync/storage you need to give the user the ability to at least pin files for offline. The last statement I was told was that the last 20 projects are cached. So what if I work on 3 projects and they have many smaller files linked into an assembly file. Then based on that comment Fusion is fully unable to work even with some work cached locally because well my data is incomplete.

Adobe with its creative cloud also has a system in place to make sure that offline Photoshop is running a valid subscription - so this should not be a concern for Fusion or a reason to block any deeper local storage ability.

The other thing I currently really disagree with is actually how Fusion stores files and where Fusion is even installed on my Mac. It is all over the place not following standard procedures. I think you would make yourself life and for us users much easier if Fusion would be installed in the App folder and Fusion files would be in a local Fusion folder the user can specify. This also provides then the ability to upload a step file into the account via drag n drop into the folder and in A360 I can convert it into a Fusion file if desired or load it locally with a direct import into Fusion.

Just some thoughts.

cekuhnen · ‎03-27-2015

arrr you all are heretics ! Joke aside, I fully agree that I do not see a problem with cloud first but still allow local storage and work.

With Comcast often having hick-ups uhm ja ....

roambotics_scott · ‎03-27-2015

Yeah making the app work offline doesn't cripple anything with the cloud - if anything, it makes it stronger.

cekuhnen · ‎03-27-2015

So true - I just love working here in my studio. Jumping into my car, driving down to the lab at Wayne State, running the CNC or MakerBot, adjusting stuff there, having lunch at a local dim sum place, driving back home, logging back into Fusion and continue working with the chances done at Wayne.

Or a student struggeling with a file, I log into their account adjust the design, log out and let them know the problem is solved.

Or working with a client on a project and sharing the design. He works it syncs to me later. I work and it syncs to him afterwards.

That is just F like fantastic.

But if then the internet or server fails it is F like fail.

Anonymous · ‎03-27-2015

Yep, cloud is super powerful and the future looks bright, but we still need to work local files offline if we so choose.

roambotics_scott · ‎03-27-2015

My guess is that they're using S3 and some other AWS services which would make this highly non-trivial

carl_bass · ‎03-28-2015

Luke,

Happy to refund your money if you like.

Most of the users are/will be commercial users. But even at $300/year or $1200/year, Fusion 360 is an incredibly good deal (but that's just me)

Anonymous · ‎03-28-2015

Carl, I appreciate the offer, but I am invested in Fusion. That is why I am so adamant about better offline functionality, as I believe it will be important to Fusion's success in industry, the biggest area of spending for CAD software, and Fusion's only real source of income. The way I see it, you have software and vision that could very well knock every large CAD package off it's foundation, but a dealbreaker is a dealbreaker, and the way offline is right now, if you're not super invested in Fusion, its a dealbreaker.

Then again, it's not my company or my product, but as an invested customer I feel I must communicate to the team my experience and thoughts with the software and how I arrived at these conclusions.

For example, Bankim's suggestion that syncing all projects offline is a poor idea because of disk space is just verbal fluff to me because it's simply not a cost driver due to the cost of local storage these days.

Anonymous · ‎03-28-2015

I believe they are using S3 and so this probably won't be an option... but with simultaneous offline storage you could easily link that up to a dropbox account or workspace FTP and it wouldn't be an issue. 😉

roambotics_scott · ‎03-28-2015

Carl - the only reason the price matters is that it sets certain standards and expectations.

As soon as you start saying something is out of beta and start charging for something, people (reasonably) expect it to work for them.

That means stability should be rock solid and they don't want to deal with nagging things like the app being slow or broken with bad network connectivity.. and even that is something that people will tolerate if they think there is an honest effort to fix it but here we're being told what seems to me to be «for purely philosophical reasons, we're not going to make the app work on its own».

Listen to the people above and to the ones asking for more stability, do what they're asking (or at least have a much better reason not to) and F360 can change the world.

Wait too long and Onshape will catch up and eat your lunch.

roambotics_scott · ‎03-28-2015

Just to be clear - they can definitely do it. It's just that it probably means refactoring a bit and writing an abstract adaptor that hides the details of the actual storage.. probably more than worth it though because then we could have a purly local (1 machine) solution, an Intranet / managed solution and the ability to pick a third party back-end other than Amazon (for people who prefer that).

The real trick is probably that it's not just storage but compute and other things being done on the back end that will be very difficult to make usable for people outside of Autodesk (and they probably have proprietary stuff in there that they wouldn't want to give away anyway).. not sure how you fix that.

Lonnie.Cady · ‎03-28-2015

What i don't understand is that everyone knew what Fusion was about before the invested their time or money in it. Nothing in thier direction about being cloud based has changed. I really like Fusion and took advantage of the early adopter pricing. I knew full well going in I would not be able to use it for customer projects. I made the decision because I believe the opinion of the cloud will slowly change and I will be ready and ahead of the curve when it does. I can also use it for my designs I own.

As for OnShape catching up. I don't think so. The complaint here is about not being able to have better offline support or files that exist only offline. I have an OnShape account out of curiosity and read their discussion on offline and can tell you it will probably never be an option with them. I agree we should be able to work offline during any back end maintenance.

Anonymous · ‎03-28-2015

When I signed up for Fusion it was advertised that their cloud system allowed for robust collaboration and there was offline mode. It did not advertise that collaboration is not at all robust, or that offline mode was simply a way to start new projects *sometimes* and work on stuff on your account that you've opened previously.

Of note is last major patch I couldn't save any designs. Fusion said "you must go online to update your project list before you can save your document." Say what?!

I say collaboration is not at all robust because as of today the only benefit is you can open someone elses design or share a link to the file. Current collaboration doesn't allow common cloud based collab tools such as user permissions, simultaneous edits, presentation style sharing, or branching and merging projects. If I invite someone to my project there is no way to stop them from deleting the entire contents of the project. NOTHING. Disguntled employee? Project gone. Open source project sabotages? Project gone. Someones kid gets on the computer and starts pressing random buttons? Project maybe gone.

So I don't think asking to have the ability to add offline files and keep them offline only is really asking too much, especially since the API darn near already supports that.

Oh, and here's another interesting thing regarding NDAs. If you get on a lab computer and log in and open one of your designs, it goes into this folder, and can be slurped by anyone who has access to that computer. I'm sure many of us has had the experience of downloading work onto a public computer and feeling upset when you realize you forgot to delete it from the downloads folder. 😉

roambotics_scott · ‎03-28-2015

What i don't understand is that everyone knew what Fusion was about before the invested their time or money in it. Nothing in thier direction about being cloud based has changed. I really like Fusion and took advantage of the early adopter pricing. I knew full well going in I would not be able to use it for customer projects. I made the decision because I believe the opinion of the cloud will slowly change and I will be ready and ahead of the curve when it does. I can also use it for my designs I own.

It's great that it works for you, but there are clearly other people who really like it who see it as broken.

As for OnShape catching up. I don't think so. The complaint here is about not being able to have better offline support or files that exist only offline. I have an OnShape account out of curiosity and read their discussion on offline and can tell you it will probably never be an option with them.

By «catching up» I meant in terms of capability.

I'm personally agnostic about the cloud / web stuff (which, frankly, I think is the right position.. assuming there is a reasonable assurance of security and reliability).

The underlying technology and backend fundamentally doesn't matter.

It's all in the experience.

The thing needs to be fast, reliable, not crash (or be very easily recoverable with no data loss if it does).

It'll never work for people who want offline, but for someone like me (individual or small team in a hardware startup) who just wants a great, integrated CAD solution that they can use anywhere (read: natively on a Mac), it could grow into something better than F360 (or at least comprable to it).

It's definitely not there yet, but if I were Autodesk, I'd worry about losing the HW startup market. Whether it's us or not, some companies like us will end up being big, and we'll keep using whatever works for us as we grow until there is a very compelling reason to switch to something else.

Get and keep us now and it could mean significant amounts of recurring revenue long into the feature. Lose us to Onshape (or some unknown startup) and we're not coming back.

I agree we should be able to work offline during any back end maintenance.

Actually I have a different take on back end maintenance.

If it's a stand-alone app, it should work offline.. but unless absolutely necessary, any maintainence or deploys should be rolling / zero-downtime.

How often does Facebook or Twitter roll out changes ?

How often do they have noticable downtime or lose data integrity in the process ?

cekuhnen · ‎03-28-2015

I think this cloud offline talk here takes a sour note.

I have to agree that also when I read about collaboration and offline I assumed well file permission+sharing and also working offline fully.

Now in the current situation offline mode is kinda more a basic work a little but you cannot load any external data here. That already cripples the offline mode - specifically when I would be a client at a remote location.

Having that said I personaly had many good experiences with the A360 sofar in my teaching and work and I assume that step by step functions are added with updates.

prabakarm · ‎04-02-2015

This idea station thread has many branches so I want to step back a bit and talk about the problems Fusion 360 is trying to solve, overall mental model and bring it back to system avialability/offline conversation. With Fusion 360 we are trying to solve three strategic problems as discussed in the roadmap blog.

The overall mental model in Fusion 360 is a product data centric model with design data and other related data from external sources or created for the product, people working on the product, activity the people do, all being interrelated so that we can deliver tools for a collaborative product development experience and make the management of all the product data transparent to the user. So when you hit save all the changes to those three facets (people, activity and data) gets saved. So a particular version could have changes in geometry, meta data such as parameters, materials which help in creating and displaying the geometry, comments and eventually markups associated with the person in the project etc etc. A rich set of interelated information gets saved and there is is no single file capturing all this info. The data is distributed and certain aspects of the data can acted independent of each other thru multiple devices and by different people. So a stake holder can use A360 web or mobile app to view the model you worked on, comment etc without the need to know or have Fusion 360. BTW, if you are wondering about Fusion archive file or .f3D and thinking that it is the "Fusion file", it is not. It basically contains modeling data such as geometry and feature receipe. It does not know about people, projects, folders, activity, eventually branch/merge information etc. So it is a bit different than than products like Solid Edge or SWX or Inventor.

So to to continue to execute on the vision discussed in Will's blog and bring this collaborative product development and transparent data management experience we had to manage the data more intelligently and the distributed nature of it does not lend easily to a single file save on the desktop or dropbox. Take a look at this real time multiser/multi-device collaboration video or the branching/merging tech being worked on as we speak. It would not be possible if the data is not managed centrally.

Now, we fully understand that this vision is work in progress and the current service uptime experience is not optimal. We are putting a lot of resources to achieve a zero downtime experience during an update and also make service outage during normal operations a rarity. The infrastructure changes we made with the March update is a major step towards it. We also understand the need to work offline when you are hit with connectivity issues. We want to improve the offline experience but we cannot make Fusion 360 a desktop product which is what is essentially requested in many of these offline threads. The ability to save all the interelated product data discussed above locally, support existing PDM systems so that users can manage that data etc. is fundamentally changing what Fusion 360 is all about and the problems it is trying to solve.

We will take the feedback on better offline experience and come back with a POV without diluting the vision for Fusion 360.

Thanks,

Prabakar.

roambotics_scott · ‎04-02-2015

There is no need to compromise the vision or say no to most of what people above want. Two things can get you there. Distributed version control (like Git) and undo to the start (atomically save every step and sync to the central repository (when connected) as often as possible. Doing that also lets you replace explicit saves with tags and let people just use a local repository when they prefer it and almost everyone would be happy.

Anonymous · ‎04-03-2015

I guess I don't see the issue.

Make it so you can add an *.f3d to your offline cache, is this no different than creating a new document offline?

Allow STEP & SAT imports direct to document offline, is this no different than importing McMaster Carr parts? Is that no different than creating components in an offline document?

And taking it one step futher, allowing a document to be offline only just makes it so it doesn't sync.

I'm not asking for a complete overhaul of anything, I don't think.

prabakarm · ‎04-03-2015

Luke,

I would like to focus on the problems you started this idea station post and make sure we are clear on what we agree/disagree instead of focussing on solutions.

Fusion 360 is a cloud based product and many of our priorities and choices are driven by that. So on the 7 problems you highlighted I agree on 4), 5) and we are focussed on it. On 3) I would say it is only when there are connectivity issues. On 6) we can look into STEP, IGES and .f3d but not the rest. 7) is an interesting requirement which requires some thought.

1), 2) is not something we expect to support with offline. On 1) we expect to handle it thru our strict security and audit measures which is documented in our trust center - http://www.autodesk.com/trust/overview

Prabakar.

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