Autodesk Empower Engineers with A360 Cloud Collaboration Tool

Understanding the unique needs of designers and engineers, Autodesk pioneered A360—the first cloud collaboration tool geared for design and engineering projects. A360 Team is a modern tool for working together that breaks down silos, brings teams together across time and space, and enables data management to recede into the background and essentially be invisible to the people using it.

While the traditional means of collaboration goes obsolete with hefty workarounds and less productivity due to reliance on email and old project management tools, Autodesk cloud-based tools like A360 and Fusion 360empower designers and engineers to work in whole new ways and are reinventing the modern design and collaboration experience. At Autodesk University in Las Vegas, the company announced that A360 Team will be available globally later this month.

Yesterday’s means of collaboration are failing designers and engineers who require an entirely different scale of working together and sharing information. Enormous 3D model file sizes, data with a very high level of fidelity and precision and 3D visualization are just a few of Autodesk customers’ requirements. Reliance on email and traditional project management tools results in clunky workarounds and lost productivity.

“The reality is that all projects — no matter what you are designing and making — are done in teams,” said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of Information Modeling and Platform Products at Autodesk. “Nobody works on design projects in isolation. A360 easily connects project team members working together so naturally they don’t even have to think about it—it just happens.”

Connecting Projects, People, and Data

The future of working together with A360 is based on three guiding principles:

• Simplicity: A360 removes the complexity of setting up teams, managing and working together on design and engineering projects. Team members can concentrate on core activities and not get caught up trying to understand different file formats, versions, locations. Teams also have the confidence of having access to the right information, in the right format, at the right time.

• Invisibility: When teams are working together on projects, they need to focus on the task at hand. A360 removes distractions by ensuring tedious tasks like version control “just happen.” It eliminates the constant frustration of moving between different tools, newsfeeds, platforms, screens, etc. — the collaboration experience becomes invisible within the tools you use day to day.

• Integrated Platform: A360 also serves as an extensible collaboration platform for third parties to build integrated applications on top of as Autodesk has done with Fusion 360. Its APIs allow developers to seamlessly integrate a user’s context and role into a project. A360 puts the project, whether it’s one component of a large assembly or a sleek consumer product, at the center of it all to keep team members, clients and other stakeholders informed and involved throughout the entire design and fabrication process.