I just saw Steve Bedder’s blog post stating Autodesk pushed a the August update of Autodesk PLM 360 over the weekend. I haven’t blogged about new PLM 360 updates regularly and I’m not sure I will going forwards, I also have no real desire to rehash what Autodesk are capable of doing themselves via their social network. So if you aren’t following Autodesk PLM 360 social sites then you should be, here are a few of my favourites (al right its the whole lot, but they’re all great in their own way):

Under the Hood

Autodesk MFG

Autodesk PLM 360 with Mike Watkins

Autodesk PLM 360 Facebook page

Autodesk PLM 360 Twitter account

Autodesk PLM 360 YouTube Channel (PLM TV)

Autodesk PLM 360 user forums & Idea Exchange

Autodesk PLM 360 Wiki – What’s New

Right so why am I excited? This month there are three new features, they are all solid and really can’t wait to play with them:

You can read more about these on the Autodesk Wiki, see above. But generally speaking:

  • Filtered Pick Lists will allow you to tidy up your workspace Items but making the data more relevant, ‘chain linking’ associative filtered lists to whittle the data down to just what you need and they’ve allowed us to control the visibility of the Filtered Pick List Fields between Edit Only & Always. The downside is you can’t make these ‘Filtered’ picklists linking picklists, so from a scripting standpoint you won’t be able to access data in the data’s originating Item. But that shouldn’t detract from the power these will wield. On the upside, you can covert your old smelly picklists to these news ones without any data loss.
  • This is my favourite and will likely be a very welcome addition for a large number of users. Simultaneously Create & Add Linked Items from the Parent Item, now this can be done in the BOM, Linked/Workflow Items, via Relationships & the Project Management tabs. Now that last one, project management,is sexual. I’m really looking forward to what can be achieved with it, I love that they’ve added support for this feature across all the ‘reference’ tabs in one hit.
  • One of the things that irks me with Vault, is it has a terrible notification system built into the ECO tool. People just end up ignoring the resulting emails & work items but they largely appear the same and can bombard the users. PLM 360 on the other hand does a much better job in that department, it still needed some work though and this new feature really puts some fire in its belly by allowing you to leverage the user groups & roles to generate email lists using two new scripting functions.

It really is quite incredible how much this product has developed since January this year, its exciting times & I’m sure there will be some impressive additions between now & Autodesk University/Christmas. hehe.