vault-Buzzsaw

A few weeks ago I blogged about the new features in Autodesk Vault Professional 2014. One of the key things I pondered on was whether or not the Buzzsaw seats which were provided as part of Vault Collaboration AEC would be included as part of this years amalgamated Vault product. Well I have great news, it most certainly is included, exciting stuff indeed. Surprisingly, there’s still no mention of Buzzsaw being offered as a product within the Vault Professional ‘Suite’ on Autodesk.com. Performing a search online for ‘Autodesk Vault Professional 2014 Buzzsaw‘ returns results for Design & Motion blog posts and the Vault 2014 Readme on the Autodesk Wikihelp, if you go on to expand out the ‘Vault for Inventor Products’ section you will find a reference to the two products being mentioned together within the same paragraph:

Vault 2014 Readme - Buzzsaw

Its the second red highlighted bullet point which points you in the right direction, albeit not entirely telling you what you need to do to get this baby up and running.

  • Log into your Subscription Center
  • Click on Downloads
  • Then under the Product Enhancements sub heading, click on Download
  • In there you will find a link called ‘Autodesk Buzzsaw Benefit for Vault Professional Subscription’. Click it
  • The first thing you will need to do is set up a trial site. It’s here where you choose your final site name and will set the URL for the site:

Buzzsaw trial

 

  • Once that’s complete you will need to fill in the Buzzsaw Benefit Form, the link for that is back on last subscription center page we were on.
  • I had a problem at this point, the Salesforce contract site informed me my contract didn’t have a valid Vault Professional Subscription. I got in touch with @AutodeskHelp on twitter, who sorted it out within 6 hours. Awesome service!
  • Fill out the form as shown below:

Buzzsaw benefit sign up

  • Then you just have to be patient. 

You will receive a few confirmation and acknowledgement emails. The key thing you need to know here is that you get one Buzzsaw login per seat of Vault Professional, each one of those seats then has 1GB of storage on the Buzzsaw servers. The reason for this is the subscription benefit only extends to the entry level version of Buzzsaw and not Vault Professional. Here’s a quick overview of the features so you can see if you need to upgrade or not:

Buzzsaw Standard:

  • Centralize Multi-Discipline Models for Navisworks
  • Exchange Models Across Companies
  • Design Review & Markup
  • Design Application Integration
  • Notifications & Alerts

Buzzsaw Professional:

  • Business Processes & Workflow
  • Reporting
  • Dashboards
  • Construction Forms
  • Document Register
  • Bid Manager

Closing Thoughts

So far I’ve noticed two Autodesk products which haven’t been graced with a 2014 release or even had their imagery & iconography updated to suit Autodesk’s new brand. The first one is Autodesk Design Review and the second one is Buzzsaw…. This leads me to wonder what is going to happen to these two products. What it does say for sure, is for this year at least, development of these two products has stopped. I can fully understand why with Autodesk Design Review, since it makes a lot of sense to focus on the Autodesk 360 platform and its associated Autodesk 360 Mobile App(s). This is where I’m a little confused with Buzzsaw, I’d say there is definitely a conflict of features between it & Autodesk 360/Autodesk PLM 360. The latter are the new kids on the block and are or will certainly be getting more of the attention from now on. Buzzsaw is an old product now, what’s to become of it and all the customers who are vested in it? Will they get ported over to PLM 360?

This leads me to another thought I’d like to end with. Autodesk now has suites for all of their core software industries, the only one it doesn’t have a suite for is Product Data Management. Will we soon see a suite of tools defining the flow of Product data from the desktop inside the company firewall, to the cloud outside it? Will this come of age with Autodesk’s plans to enter into the CAM market? I really hope we do.

In the meantime I’m off to play with my new collaboration toy and all the mobile app goodness it comes with.

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