Collaboration, sharing files and version control for student projects at a university

[tbuchnerVWXQA]

Hi,

I hope this is the correct forum for this question.

I am wondering what the intended workflow for Fusion 360 is regarding collaboration and version control etc.

At the moment we use SolidWorks and do version control/colaboration through storing the file on a cloud service. We have a few part/assembly files that students work on and find the version control especially difficult. 

How would we best solve this with students using Fusion 360 to model things.
Would we for example make a "manager" account that shares a project folder. Students would then get invited to that folder and work collaboratively on components and assemblies in that folder. At the end of the year, students would loose access to that folder and new students get access to continue working on these parts?

Thank you soo much for your help!

[tbuchnerVWXQA]

Is this the wrong forum to ask? Can you point me to another forum where this question could be answered? Is the question not understandable?
The phone support told me to post my question in this forum ...

[o.briggs.1]

There are several ways that you can do it depending on what the students are doing and why you want them to share their work. Fusion 360 is all cloud based. All your files are stored within Fusion 360's cloud servers so there is no need for an external cloud storage system. It is accessible directly from within Fusion 360's Data Panel.

Every time a file is saved (irrespective of it being one person working on it or multiple) a new version is saved within the data panel. Each version can be viewed with a timestamp, description of the work completed, which person saved the file and which version you are now on. These versions are stored in a list so you can go back through the versions to see what has been happening. You can also open old versions and promote them to be the most up to date version if you decide to start over from an older version.

When working with others in Fusion you typically all join a Fusion Team. This is an area where you can all see the files that have been worked on and are ongoing. You can set different permissions for different people as with most cloud storage solutions but ultimately everyone in the team can open and make changes to files if that is what you set your permissions to. When a team member has a file open it will show up on the data panel to indicate who has it open. Alternatively, if another team member has a file open and has made changes to that file, the file becomes "reserved" for that team member until they save their file and stop making changes. This prevents any issues of students working on the same file at one time and overriding each others work. If you try to open a file that someone else is already editing it will tell you that one of you might loose your work. It's a recent and really good system.

Depending on the type of shared work they are doing students often make their own Fusion Team. Every account is able to create one Fusion Team so if they are working in a group for a project, one of them can make a new team and add the others to it. As long as the team remains active and all members stay on the team they will always have access to the files within it. If they loose access to the team because the creator takes them off it for example then they will loose access to the files, but they can always copy projects into their own personal team if they want to keep it at the end of the year. This means that each year you don't have to reset anything because the next year will make their own team and the old one remains unaffected. You can ask to be added to the student's teams if you want access and this way you don't have to remove old students from your own team to add new ones because they can create them themselves.

If students are working on the same project as a previous year you can add them to the same team as the previous year was using and they can pick up where the others left off. you can then choose to remove the old students to remove their access or just leave them on the team and change their permissions to viewer only so they can see the files and download a copy for their personal use but not make changes to the main file.