OneDrive Customer Spotlight Series - Autodesk
Published Jul 23 2019 10:09 AM 38.2K Views
Microsoft

Driving customer success and satisfaction has always been one of the core priorities of the Microsoft OneDrive team. We have the privilege of working continuously with exemplary customers who leverage the latest and greatest Microsoft 365 technologies to drive digital transformation.

 

Starting today, we’ll publish a monthly blog post to recognize our customers who have embarked on their journey to a modern workplace with OneDrive and Microsoft 365. We take pride in sharing the business successes and IT accomplishments of our customers and hope these inspiring stories and best practices across enterprise and SMB will help you in your endeavors as well.

 

This month we take the opportunity to acknowledge Autodesk who has been both a customer and partner over the years.

 

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Based in San Rafael, California, Autodesk makes software for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, and entertainment industries. The company’s goal is to take the complexity out of its design products and tools so that customers can use them from anywhere.

“We help people imagine, design, and make a better world. We automate our customers’ design and make processes, so they can realize the Future of Making Things—which enables them to do more, better, with less negative impact on the world,” says Prakash Kota, Chief Information Officer at Autodesk.

To further benefit from its Office 365 subscription, Autodesk decided to migrate all employees to Microsoft OneDrive from a competitive third-party solution.

“With OneDrive, employees can access their files and data from anywhere, anytime, and on any device. We made the move to OneDrive to truly maximize the benefits and value of the Office 365 platform,” says Justin Brown, Senior Service Manager for Office 365 and OneDrive at Autodesk. 

Faced with the challenge of migrating millions of employee files for more than 12,000 employees (which includes globally dispersed Autodesk employees and third-party contractors across the US, EMEA, and Asia) to Microsoft OneDrive, global software company collaborated with Microsoft Partner Network member Mover and customer-success service Microsoft FastTrack to execute a smooth transition; watch and learn more via Mover’s related case study video, “Migrating Autodesk to OneDrive.”

 

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Scott Buck, Human Resources Business Partner for IT at Autodesk, realizes the value of the transition. “In the beginning, we were concerned regarding the change, but after the migration, we realized OneDrive is a really simple tool to use with easy sharing experience. I think one of the big advantages that I see in OneDrive is the ability to essentially collaborate on a document in real-time.”

Read the full Autodesk case study.

 

We also appreciate the wonderful partnership we have with Autodesk. Earlier this year, we announced new integrations with Autodesk AutoCAD to better connect the industry-leading capabilities of AutoCAD with DWG files in SharePoint and OneDrive.

Expanding on this partnership, at SharePoint Conference North America ,we announced AutoCAD-based previews of DWG files in OneDrive and SharePoint. 

 

We continue to evolve OneDrive as a place to access, share, and collaborate all your files in Microsoft 365, keeping them protected and readily accessible on all your devices, anywhere.

Learn more about similar customer stories at Microsoft Customer Evidence.

You can stay up-to-date on all things via the OneDrive Blog and take advantage of end-user training resources on our Office support center

Thank you again for your support of OneDrive. We look forward to your continued feedback on UserVoice and hope to connect with you at Ignite or another upcoming Microsoft or community-lead event.

 

Thanks for your time reading all about OneDrive,

Ankita Kirti – OneDrive | Microsoft

 

4 Comments
Copper Contributor

I’m sorry, but how can you guys spotlight Autodesk and talk about these great AutoCAD file integrations when the desktop versions of AutoCAD (that most professionals use) are completely incompatible with OneDrive for Windows?

 

The second you open any AutoCAD file that is in a synced OneDrive or SharePoint folder, AutoCAD creates two files (one .dwl and one .dwl2).  These files are locked and cannot be synced. OneDrive warns users there is an issue with these files causing sync to stop. So due to this, the AutoCAD saved files, backups files, and any other synced folders and files will be seeming paused or randomly delayed from synchronization until AutoCAD is closed and OneDrive realizes those .dwl files have disappeared.  Which, depending on how many SPO sites and OneDrive files and folders you are syncing, can take some time.  After AutoCAD has closed, pausing and restarting the OneDrive sync can kickstart and help speed this re-sync process along, but that's a manual workaround that requires user intervention and leaves the user minutes to hours of sync behind depending on how long the AutoCAD files have been open.

 

Essentially: opening an AutoCAD file breaks OneDrive and SharePoint sync.

 

Microsoft: You can help everyone out with this! If OneDrive provided admins the ability to discreetly or silently ignore or pass over file types rather than just the block file types option, which produces red “x”s on everything and thus freaks out the users, this entire problem could likely be mitigated. OneDrive could then skip over the troublesome .dwl and .dwl2 files or any other file types that other troublesome programs generate.  Sync could then keep going constantly and no logjam or window of downtime would ever occur.

Copper Contributor

I fully agree with the above post. 

 

Another issue is that saving an Autocad .dwg file seems to delete the file, update the .bak file, and then create a new .dwg file with the same name.

This results in versioning not working for .dwg files. I have to tell users to never remove .bak files in order for us to be able to restore drawings to earlier versions.

 

I'm not sure on the best way to go forward but the integration for desktop needs to be much better. 
Maybe a onedrive/sharepoint library for drawings with direct connection to autodesk products, bypassing windows explorer?

And then how to handle xrefs? 

 

 

 

 

 

Copper Contributor

Curious what version everyone is using for Autocad and what build of one drive? 

are you also synchronizing SharePoint?

Copper Contributor

Autocad 2019, syncing sharepoint online library.

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