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In our last poll we wanted to know your biggest pain points in daily CAD work. I must say I was not surprised at all.

The most common pain point was missing files and file incompatibility issues. The same problem exists in a wide range of businesses and practices, such as film making, graphic design, programming, and more. Even the most common office tasks of forwarding a document or presentation usually run into missing files problem, not to mention version incompatibility.

Project Butterfly offers an alternative to email attachments, using the Share feature.

When you import a design to Butterfly with the accompanying fonts files, reference files and plot styles, they become bundled with your design. In Project Butterfly, sharing a design is the ability to send a secure invitation to one or more people, and they can then access your drawing using a link, and not endless file attachments. The link they receive takes them to Project Butterfly – even if they don’t have a Butterfly account. You can invite anyone!

Because your invitees see the design in Project Butterfly, they will see the design exactly the way you do. All you have to share with them is the master DWG file, and the design resources bundle themselves automatically.

Want your invitees to just view the drawing and not make modifications to it? No problem. Project Butterfly addresses security in a top priority, so we have permission controls built it to all collaborative features. When you share a drawing you can also restrict your invitees from downloading the DWG to their computer.

Put an end to file attachment chaos, start sharing your designs with Project Butterfly. Here’s a video to show you how:

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We all know the story.

You’ve made a change in the sizes of the windows, or the diameter of an axis. You need to check with your contractors if that’s alright and make changes of their own.

Save as. Send email. Receive an email with an attachment. Download the DWG. Continue from there.

Oh wait. You’ve also changed the original DWG since then. OK, copy paste, copy paste and so on. And that’s in the ideal scenario in which your colleague has the right software, CTB and SHX files and more.

Fast forward a month later, you need to check an older version of the drawing. The file is gone, but you still have it in your email. Where? You can’t find it.

And then there’s Project Butterfly.

In Butterfly you conduct the reviews from your drawing environment, streamlining the process and making it more easy for all reviewers and yourself.

In Butterfly, you don’t have to switch between AutoCAD, Outlook (or gmail) and your windows explorer. You don’t have to worry about sending all the right files, such as SHX and CTB. You don’t have to worry whether your reviewer has got the right CAD software or version. And most importantly – you don’ t have to manage and maintain many files and email messages. It’s all saved and organized automatically.

See this video on how to get started with your review:

Left to right: Iris Shoor, Tal Weiss and Jonathan Seroussi

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For us, Project Butterfly is more than a tech preview. It is a vision in which us, designers, should spend more time being creative and designing, and spend less time handling software quirks. We shouldn’t be chasing old emails, and we shouldn’t be keeping dozens of files for the same design.

The team in Autodesk that works around the clock to produce the best online CAD experience is a relatively small group of people in Tel Aviv, Israel. Until recently we were a start-up company. We consist of 20 dedicated people, mostly software engineers, and just a little over a year ago we were only 8 people.

The idea behind Project Butterfly was conceived circa 2006 by Iris Shoor, an architect at the time. She was troubled by the fact that there wasn’t a fluent way to collaborate on CAD drawings, in a business where collaboration and communication is a very important element.

The world of software and the Web was changing. Productivity software was migrating to the web in the form of Google Docs, YouTube, and other socially-able websites. Iris recognized the potential and the possibility of editing and collaborating on CAD drawings on the Web.

She gathered two of her former colleagues, Jonathan Seroussi and Tal Weiss, who both have also had knowledge and experience in software development and the GIS industry. Together they launched the company that would later produce Project Butterfly, despite all the pessimism and discouragement they received from key figures in the industry.

Since that point in time, with over 2 years of constant development, the Butterfly team has created a patented technology, based on analyzing and rendering over 10,000 different DWGs. We are very happy to spread our passion of technology and CAD throughout the CAD community with the help of the Autodesk community of users.

Written in retrospect by Asaf Sagi, a product manager in the team.