AutoCAD WS - Blog -

Explaining AutoCAD WS to Your Friends

Nov 11

In the last 12 months users have registered over two and a half million accounts with AutoCAD WS. Even with millions of drawings being uploaded to AutoCAD WS, I believe that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of potential users of AutoCAD WS.

So my question is how do you explain AutoCAD WS to people who haven’t experienced it yet?

Perhaps, more importantly, who are these people? Well they’re your colleagues and clients – people who work with AutoCAD on a regular basis, often every day. We strongly believe that anyone working with AutoCAD can only benefit from an introduction to AutoCAD WS. So what’s stopping people?

Here are some of the things we imagine people who are unfamiliar with WS are saying.

What’s AutoCAD WS? I’ve never heard of it. We don’t advertise on TV but, if you work with CAD professionally, you should probably have heard of us by now. If you know a CAD professional who doesn’t know about AutoCAD WS, show them WS on your phone or tablet. Share a DWG with them and see what happens when they get the email allowing them to view and edit the drawing without registering an account.
If it’s free, why do I have to register an account? The registration process is very light but it enables us to ensure that the content you upload to your AutoCAD WS account is protected and secure and uniquely available to you wherever you try to access it from.
How do I know my work is safe when I upload it to AutoCAD WS? Of course this is a legitimate concern and the best response is that Autodesk adheres to industry best practices for secure storage of all you data. For more information about security and AutoCAD WS, read our white paper.
I can’t always be online so AutoCAD WS is no use to me. Actually the AutoCAD WS mobile app for iOS and Android does allow you to view and edit your drawings when you’re offline. It’s true that you need to be connected once to the internet in order to save the contents of you online folder locally on your mobile device, but once you have completed the sync you can take your smartphone or tablet with you and edit on the go. The next time you connect to the internet, your changes will be synced back to your AutoCAD WS online account.

So even if someone has never used AutoCAD WS before, getting them to use it for the first time should be simple.

How are you persuading your colleagues to give AutoCAD WS a chance?

Plotting From Your Mobile – Poll

Nov 03

It always feels great when people actually use the features we build into AutoCAD WS. The number of users who plot their drawings from the AutoCAD WS web version has steadily risen over the past few months so we thought that it would be a good time to ask whether you thought this feature would be a useful addition to the mobile app.

There are several options that we could look at for adding a plot function to the AutoCAD WS mobile app, so have a look at the folliwng poll and tell us what you think. As usual, you can write in your own response or let us know in the comments if you have an idea or a suggestion that we haven’t included.

AutoCAD WS Comes to Amazon

Oct 27

We are currently celebrating THREE MILLION downloads of AutoCAD WS for iOS and Android in a little over a year since the app was first released.

In addition to this milestone, we are also pleased to announce a new outlet where Android users can find and download AutoCAD WS – the Amazon Appstore. Currently the Amazon Appstore is only available to people located in the United States, so if you know anyone in the US who has not downloaded AutoCAD WS yet, make sure you send them this link as soon as possible: http://autode.sk/vx4IQU

What Viewing Capabilities Would You Like for the AutoCAD WS Mobile App?

Oct 23

We’re still a while away from announcing the next release of AutoCAD WS, but we’re looking at adding to the viewing capabilities within the mobile app in a future release and we thought it would be a good idea to run a poll and gauge the interest of our users.

We have put a few ideas into the poll below, but, as always, we really want to hear from you about the viewing functionality that you would like to see added at some point in the future. Pick something from the poll or leave us a comment either here or on our Facebook page.

And don’t forget there’s still time to win one of our exclusive AutoCAD WS t-shirts. Just send us a picture of you or one of your colleagues using AutoCAD WS on a mobile phone or tablet outside the office onsite somewhere.

And now that poll: