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Explaining AutoCAD WS to Your Friends

In the last 12 months users have registered over two and a half million accounts with AutoCAD WS. Even with millions of drawings being uploaded to AutoCAD WS,  I believe that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of potential users of AutoCAD WS.

So my question is how do you explain AutoCAD WS to people who haven’t experienced it yet?

Perhaps, more importantly, who are these people? Well they’re your colleagues and clients – people who work with AutoCAD on a regular basis, often every day. We strongly believe that anyone working with AutoCAD can only benefit from an introduction to AutoCAD WS. So what’s stopping people?

Here are some of the things we imagine people who are unfamiliar with WS are saying.

  • What’s AutoCAD WS? I’ve never heard of it. We don’t advertise on TV but, if you work with CAD professionally, you should probably have heard of us by now. If you know a CAD professional who doesn’t know about AutoCAD WS, show them WS on your phone or tablet. Share a DWG with them and see what happens when they get the email allowing them to view and edit the drawing without registering an account.
  • If it’s free, why do I have to register an account? The registration process is very light but it enables us to ensure that the content you upload to your AutoCAD WS account is protected and secure and uniquely available to you wherever you try to access it from.
  • How do I know my work is safe when I upload it to AutoCAD WS? Of course  this is a legitimate concern and the best response is that Autodesk adheres to industry best practices for secure storage of all you data. For more information about security and AutoCAD WS, read our white paper.
  • I can’t always be online so AutoCAD WS is no use to me. Actually the AutoCAD WS mobile app for iOS and Android does allow you to view and edit your drawings when you’re offline. It’s true that you need to be connected once to the internet in order to save the contents of you online folder locally on your mobile device, but once you have completed the sync you can take your smartphone or tablet with you and edit on the go. The next time you connect to the internet, your changes will be synced back to your AutoCAD WS online account.

So even if someone has never used AutoCAD WS before, getting them to use it for the first time should be simple.

How are you persuading your colleagues to give AutoCAD WS a chance?

How to Get the Best out of Plotting – Poll

More and more people are starting to use AutoCAD WS to plot their drawings and we thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the best ways to make the most of this feature. Also, we are running a poll to see what you think is still missing.

Three ways for you to use Plot with AutoCAD WS

  1. As long as you’re working on a project, you may want an up-to-date hard copy of your drawing available for anyone to stop by and have a look. Using AutoCAD WS, you can share your drawing with a colleague and have them use Plot to output to a PDF for daily printing to a regular printer or plotter.
  2. Whenever you’re out of the office whether you’re working from home or on a business trip, you can use Plot to create a PDF of your designs to print locally.
  3. When you’re visiting a site and making changes to a drawing using the AutoCAD WS mobile app for Android or iOS, you can plot the latest version including all your changes and review them as a PDF or hard copy print out.

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Who Answers Your Feedback?

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We welcome feedback at AutoCAD WS and we have several channels for receiving and dealing with it.

You can contact us by:

  • Leaving a comment on this blog
  • Writing on our Facebook wall
  • Raising an issue on our support page
  • Emailing us directly at feedback@autocadws.com

Our aim is to give you as many avenues as possible to reach us.

But what happens when you send us feedback? Well you might be interested to know that we do not have a dedicated team of people sitting somewhere offsite going through your comments. Everything you send to us is seen by one of the core team that works on AutoCAD WS.

It’s a key part of the strategy to incorporate as many of your suggestions and comments into future versions of the product. When your comments reach the people that develop and work with AutoCAD WS, they really have an impact.

The first person who checks the feedback will filter it so that it goes to the right address and then you may get a response from someone in product management, QA or even from the marketing depending on what you were asking about. In other words, every question, complaint and compliment goes directly to one of the people who built AutoCAD WS and who is helping define the product’s direction in the immediate future.

We all sit in the same office and we regularly consult with each other and this means your comments are noted and acted upon. We pride ourselves in developing the functionality that our users demand and every new release so far has added features which originated in user feedback.

So keep talking to us and we’ll keep listening.

Pictured (from top to bottom): Adi, QA Engineer; Ilai, Development Team Leader; Iris, AutoCAD WS Product Manager; Benny, Development Team Leader

PDF Support in AutoCAD WS

Since the last release AutoCAD WS now supports PDF files both on the web and in the mobile app.

You can upload, view, annotate and share PDFs in AutoCAD WS giving you access to all your designs in a single viewer wherever you are. Now there’s no need to open different files in different viewers. Nor is there any need to store them in different places.

When you view PDF files using the web app at www.autocadws.com, you can add objects, text, dimensions and use markups bringing your PDFs in line with the way you view and edit DWG designs. If your PDF runs over more than one page a navigation widget appears in AutoCAD WS to allow you to jump ahead to any point.

PDF Support in the Mobile App

The Android mobile app also fully supports PDFs with all the functionality of the web version.

For now the iOS mobile app only allows viewing and sharing of PDFs, but this will be updated at the next mobile release to bring it in line with the Android mobile app and the web app. There will be more news about this as we get closer to the release date.

Are there any aspects of PDF support you still think are missing from AutoCAD WS? Let us know in the comments section.

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