What you want to snuggle up with for a cold, mid-January winter weekend is the new release of Infraworks. Autodesk calls it/him/her - Infraworks 2020 Update 2. Autodesk’s Update language as applied to Infraworks remains a head scratcher.
What marketing and sales do with the arcane Autodesk licensing and subscription mechanics often seem to befuddle everyone. Folks, you got to remember we are at the cusp of the Autodesk Fiscal Year that ends January 31, 2020. The analysts, stockholders, and corporate managers must have metrics to compare.
A Total Recall to Your Autodesk Connector
You might want to call your Autodesk Reseller well before the end of this month if you are considering seat count and/or sub changes. Just saying. Business is good. This year’s Autodesk pricing will probably not be next year’s.
The Total Recall exploding head special effect makes a point, even if that is Hollywood movie science.
Autodesk Infraworks 2020 Update 2
We all may recall that there were probably more significant interface and other changes in Infraworks 2020 Update 1 than in the initial Infraworks 2020 release.
See the What's New in Autodesk InfraWorks page to see a summary of the Infraworks 2020 past and all the Update 2 highlights.
You gotta love them little gold stars. More about them beauties in a second.
The Autodesk Civil Public Roadmaps
You might want to stare and compare…Certain commonalities should leap out. Hence, the links below intentionally open new windows. The themes Create, Connect, and Optimize.
Ramesh Sridharan, the Infraworks Product Manager, was kind enough to update the published public Infraworks road map back in December. Lots of these in Infraworks 2020 Update 2.
Tim Yarris, the Civil 3D Product Manager, release the published public Civil 3D road map earlier this month. Are a few of these in an upcoming Civil 3D 2020 Update 3?
Hey, the new Dynamo for Civil 3D Update 2 already hit the street.
Can you say Dynamo Player? Beep beep.
Sadly, there are no little gold stars in these road map posts, but there are black ones. I think too many people in Autodesk marketing were elementary school teachers in a previous lifetime. Maybe it’s just me?
Ok. Maybe we are all the STEM kids.
The Gold Stars and Productivity
One of the most famous production improvement experiments ever was based on handing out big colored stars to union blue-collar workers in a manufacturing plant. Hang up a big board on the floor with everyone’s name up there. Show up on time get a gold star. Make quota for the day- get a star. No money is involved – you know the drill…union rules.
Plant productivity doubled. After a year, those union members in the shop insisted the gold star program must become an official union benefit. Of course, the big board later got banned by a court case as being discriminatory. You can guess the rest of the story.
Infraworks 2020 Update 2 Gold Stars That Matter
Most of the Update 2 gold stars are all about better Interoperability.
See my recent in-depth blog post series – Maybe you want to start with the Civil 3D and Infraworks Interoperability post.
The Autodesk ArcGIS Connector Improvements
I made the case that we should consider the ArcGIS Connector almost a separate product.
It’s cloudy fingers reach everywhere. It’s is impossible to argue that is not a good thing.
The Autodesk Infraworks ArcGIS Connector improvements are listed below.
- Selected attribute publication from Infraworks to both ArcGIS portals and the FileGeodatabase (FGDB) fomat
- Coded values to Infraworks from ArcGIS and vice versa
- Direct ArcGIS Server layers support as well as the above mentioned ESRI Portals
The demonstrated and reasonable data validation, QAQC, collaboration, and approval workflows are already a game changer for civil engineers, surveyors, public agencies, contractors, and architects servicing in the Operations Engineering space. Did he just say “architects”?
Model Builder Improvements
- An updated Model Builder interface that allows you to choose the project coordinate system from the beginning.
“New [Infraworks} models will no longer have LL84 defined as the database coordinate system by default.”
Hoorah.
Collaboration and Share Improvements
- Model Builder will allow you to store the Infraworks’ project model locally or in BIM 360 Docs.
That means that other Connector, the Autodesk Connector, is Infraworks aware. - The ability to publish Bookmarks to users of the Autodesk Viewer in BIM 360 docs.
A new Revit Infraworks Updater Update 3 was released in conjunction with Infraworks 2020 Update 2. That is installed separately.
Shared and Confused?
These days your Autodesk Reseller is now likely also selling ERSI licenses. ESRI Resellers are selling Autodesk collections. The old school competitive spirit has become a mini gold rush to provide and enable the new levels of cloud-based, business interaction.
The often-touted Autodesk/ESRI public partnership includes another significant software vendor partner that those powers that be don’t talk about all that much – Amazon Web Services. No AWS and we probably get no substantive Autodesk and ESRI partnership.
Strategically, this is an interesting business triumvirate. I might do a separate post.
Let’s state the pertinent and the obvious…
We Don’t Choose a Cloud…
We Employ the Appropriate Cloud Tools for the Project
Both Autodesk and ESRI have significant value-added cloud-based offerings.
You should be able to name them and what benefits they offer to you and your clients.
The who is not as important as the what as far as our project work is concerned.
Personally, little ol’ me (MoreCompetency Inc.) works in cloud services provided by all the big name vendors every day. I’d guess most of you do too. I intentionally converted totally to that environment over a decade ago. Silly me.
I’m willing to pick the best of breed for the task at hand. I’m willing to move my money if vendor B can provide services that do what I need done better than vendor A. However, I consider learning curve and cost to maintain to be as important to the decision balance as the potential benefit results. Put another way, ROI (return on investment) is not as important as TCO (total cost of ownership).
I create, manage, and maintain the Framework for Civil 3D which has both a ridiculous ROI and a TCO that would make any analyst laugh out loud. Ok. That is a better business thing.
Innovation to Make Civil 3D Work
Get the Framework for Civil 3D Release 8
Sorry about that.
I would have put in more sexy new Infraworks 2020.2 videos, but at the moment no one can embed the latest ones from YouDude...er ...YouTube.
See the Autodesk Infrastructure Channel Videos