Johnathan Ward
Autodesk’s Construction Cloud platform receives regular updates and the last 2 releases (May and July) have seen a raft of long-awaited feature improvements, as well as completely new features, like the introduction of the Correspondence module (a public beta, and well worth looking at for your project communications management). For a full rundown of these new features go to the Autodesk Construction Cloud Blog or one of the product help pages - Autodesk Build, Autodesk Docs. Both pages have a What’s New section, broken down by release month.
And so, to the real purpose of this blog post, the “silent releases”, those enhancements that don’t necessarily make the headlines but nonetheless offer important productivity improvements. For convenience, I have listed all the May and July silent releases, but I will focus on some of the more significant ones – at least those that I consider significant. I’m always happy to hear others’ views on what is and isn’t important!
Assets received 2 rather significant feature enhancements in May, a new exporting format (xlsx) and location inheritance. Wow! You might say but stay with me. Previously, the export options only included the trusty PDF format and the basic CSV format, the latter often exhibiting formatting issues and requiring importing into a new spreadsheet (xlsx format) to overcome these. Being able to export directly to Excel removes that step and makes the export usable from the off. As a note to this, you can select a single or any combination of assets to export, as well as exporting all assets – a definite productivity boost.
The second enhancement, location inheritance, is I think unarguably of great significance if you use checklists in conjunction with your assets, and let's face it, why wouldn’t you! When creating an asset, it makes sense to include its location information to allow filtering and reporting. It also makes sense to use checklists to manage your quality and commissioning forms for these assets, amongst others. Well now, when you create a checklist assigned to an asset your checklist will inherit the location specified by the asset. This is significant if you create checklists from multiple assets in different locations. It’s only a couple of clicks (or taps on a mobile device) to add this location, but now you don’t need to, and it removes the chances of selecting the incorrect location before you start completing the form. A very welcome update.
Another very welcome enhancement comes in the form of a new options dialogue when exporting a PDF from the viewer. This will allow you to select which markups, issues, and photo locators are included in the export.
Next up, Data connector and Power BI updates. Here, there are some great improvements to the information that can now be garnered at both project and account level. First, there are now templates for issues and submittals. The submittals template will allow you to federate submittals across all your projects by Status, Submittal Manager, Reviewer, Subcontractor and Responsible Party, while updates to the issues template will report average days to close stats.
See the help pages for the full list of updates - May Insights Updates.
The remaining hidden gems are listed below and can be found within the help pages.
Platform
Build
Read part 2 of Autodesk Construction Cloud Hidden Gems here.
For more information on Autodesk Construction Cloud, view our product page. If you would like to understand some of the great features of Autodesk Docs, click here.
