Fusion Update at School

[julian_ruopp]

Problem: There is an older Fusion 360 Version (From June 2023) on the PCs of our School. Our Students can't open their Models they constructed at Home, beacause they have a newer version at home. I that case we have to Update the Fusion 360 Version at our school. My Question is: How often could this happen? Because updating our PCs is very expensive. Or is it possible to provide our Students an older version of Fusion360. So they could Work at School and Home !?

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@julian_ruopp @This happens when there is a change in schema which for any CAD application is not backward compatible. 

For Fusion the schema changes typically six times a year in our major updates. These are the updates we send our Education users an email that a particular major release is coming.

We recently updated Fusion on October 31 that was a schema changing major update.

The education installs comes with an update scheduler that makes the process much more simple. Can you explain on why this is an expensive process for the school to update?  

[TheCADWhisperer]

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@RajkumarIlanchelian wrote:

Can you explain on why this is an expensive process for the school to update?  

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@RajkumarIlanchelian 

I am retired now, so my information could be out of date.

But when I was teaching - our IT department had the computers locked down tight with a program called Deep Freeze that would return the HDD to approved ghosted image after each reboot.  This prevented unauthorized changes that could be objectionable for a wide variety of logical reasons.  Our IT department only updated the approved lab image twice a year after testing between semesters. (And this was considered generous as they were only obligated to update once over the summer.)

The labs used the institutional lab version of Fusion that does not automatically update.

Of course this presents the issue as described by @julian_ruopp 

My workaround solution was to have the students access Fusion Client Downloader at the start of each class and update the Fusion on their lab seat.  Of course the Deep Freeze software would wipe this change at the next reboot, but it only took a few minutes to update.  The students would do this at the start of class while I was setting up (verbal lecture) the intent of the lab exercise for the day.  My guess is the IT department would have considered this as technically a violation of installing software on school computer - but they also paid for Deep Freeze as the solution to this entirely predictable use case.

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@TheCADWhisperer Thank you for the details on how this was run on the school machines  and the IT challenges.

infact this (that schools cannot update on a regular basis is the reason why for Education we have a six month support. This is for up to six months , we keep the back end services and translators etc operational. So in your example updating twice a year was still ok as support was always available for the services. 

In @julian_ruopp case I believe that it’s not only that they are having challenges to update their machines because of IT challenges or not but students install on their personal PC/Mac as well. Now with the install on personal devices this is a separate install where we do not allow you to stay out of date. There is a forced update on these installs (we did introduce snooze but that is for 14 days). 

so there is a situation where the labs now would not update but the students personal machines did and the schema mid match happens.  

To make these schema changing updates easier for educational institutions we have schedulers that once you set it it will automatically update lab machines when there is an update with schema change with little manual attention. 

[julian_ruopp]

Hey guys, thank you for your help so far. I will test your solutions within the next week (or the week afer next - there is a lot of going on at the moment) and give your a Feedback. 

regards Julian 🙂