Time ago, I was discussing on my blog about cloud file storage as one of the potential first step CAD vendors will take to adopt cloud. One of my posts about that was – Is Google Doc is a good place to store CAD files? I was very surprised to discover that Autodesk quietly launched their Autodesk Cloud services. Thanks to my web alert and Thomas Rambach of cadtoolbox.com about the notification. You can see that Autodesk made cloud.autodesk.com website available. You can register to login and have 1GB free space to work on. Below I put some screenshots and explain few experiments I’ve made. As you can see from the home screen, it is all about Cloud Documents, and it reminds you Google Docs very much.
After quick registration (it was actually very smooth), you have an access to cloud folders.
So, what you can do? Actually, not much… You can upload files, search for them, tag them, upload next revisions. You can create folders and organize your files into these folders. On the following picture, you can see some elements of a future cloud apps features – additional storage, applications and more…
What is my take? Few months ago, I was trying out Dassault V6 Cloud Apps. Here is the link to refresh your memory. I was talking about SolidWorks n!Fuze as one of the DS V6 Cloud Services – My Experience with Dassault V6 Cloud on Amazon. If you will take a look on n!Fuze user interface and Autodesk Cloud UI, you can find some similarity. Don’t think it is wrong. I prefer to have UI simple, slick and straightforward. From that standpoint, I liked very much Autodesk Cloud appearance and user experience. However, the most important question to ask- is it going to be a viable option for people to store and use their files? How easy will be connecting from applications (desktop and web) to these services? How efficiently we can share files between these separate cloud services? All these questions are requiring a deeper discussion and answers before customers will touch these new services.
Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
