Is Onshape a good place for your project files?

traveler_hauptman

One of the things I see come up often is concern over whether the free or professional plans offer enough storage.

This bring a few thoughts to mind. (All a bit scattered)

100Gb of S3 storage on amazon will cost you $3/month plus another $9/month to download it all each and every month. Get your storage from Google and it's even cheaper (kind-of). Storage is not why we are paying Onshape $100/mo.

The fact that you can store foreign data in your Onshape document is a cute feature, but I don't think it will get much real use. The user interface is awkward when you have more than a couple files, the in-place editing is non-existent, even for text files, and there is no way for external tools to access it.

There is a real need for managing all the data of a project in a way that plays well with the access control, version/change order tracking, and distributed collaboration needs of any given organization. That is not what Onshape is. Onshape is a participant in that bigger process and needs to play well with it's peers.

If all that external data goes away. That big PDF with embedded movies that the client gave as part of their requirements. Import files with embedded meshes and previews. Then how much room does a solid model really take?  Strip out all the cached data and other bloat and it's not much.

At the same time, what if Onshape focuses on being a good team member of the whole product life-cycle team? A good team member communicates well with his peers and does his own portion of the work well. Should Onshape focus on integrating one or two chosen CAM applications? On should they focus on providing a clean and easy way for any external peer to get the data they need?

Onshape is not a PLM solution. And while it's great their core design considers version control, they made the decision to not interact with a top level version control that everyone could use, and instead integrated their own internal approach. I think there's good, valid reasons for doing this but one still has to keep this in mind.


I wonder what a good PLM solution, with Onshape handling the CAD, looks like?

 I think Onshape does a nice job of making any version of any document available to external tools. A simple URL does the trick. I would like to see Onshape handle links to external documents better. And for document that it extracts data from (DXF, etc) I'd like to see it be able to react to and incorporate changes to the source document rather than treating an 'update' as a completely new document.

Anyway, like I said at the beginning, a bit scattered.  But I definitely prefer storing my project files somewhere else.

pete_yodis

@traveler_hauptman Great topic.  There seems there could be some really good ways of interfacing between Onshape and other systems.  I think as a general trend, data is getting cheaper and cheaper by the day.  I think we will eventually see data as being free, if we are not almost there already.  We will not pay for data.  We will pay for the service that uses/consumes/creates/analyzes the data that those services sit atop of.  A personal example.  I am an Office 365 subscriber at $69 or $79 a year (can't remember what my last bill was).  I love their service for lots of reasons, one of which is they added 1 TB of cloud storage with that yearly subscription.  I now have 1.12 TB of data storage and I won't be surprised to see that increasing in the future with no extra charges for it.  Of course I could always add data if needed, but I'm nowhere close at the moment.

I wouldn't mind seeing smart connection in the tabs to Office 365 data.  OneNote pages that show up in an Onshape tab could be really great if the OneNote could be edited either in that tab, or in the native OneNote environment.  That way CAD users and Non CAD users could still communicate easily.  I could see a CAD person take a quick snapshot and drop it into the OneNote, or even better drop the URL into the OneNote (maybe even a version specific URL) for an immersive review.

The topic of meta data is interesting to me too.  I think the future lies not in creating copies of meta data in various systems and then trying to make sure that metadata is updated correctly in all those various places (like using file based CAD systems) - but in connecting up cloud based systems that give access to the meta data being hosted in their platforms.  I think meta data will be streamed and not passed off to various systems.  I watched Microsoft's Build conference this past year and saw exactly that concept being displayed in a tool of theirs that could graphically connect various services and allow each of their data to be streamed to the other connected services.  It was like watching NI's LabVIEW but for cloud connected services.  Really neat things are on the horizon.

3dcad

I don't see Onshape to become my file server, it will probably hold few copies of renderings and some outdated product data sheets - most likely only very few things needed while creating model. I would like to have a tab for links (google docs, dropbox, etc..) with decent preview. And also links to Onshape data (named views, parameter tables, BOM, etc.) working without Ons account (possible to embed into website or so).

Couple of reasons:
- If I save rendered image to Onshape and sales man is included in share, they still would need to download the image in order to email, share or use in word/excel/pp representations. You can't even create a link to image for person who doesn't have access to document. 

- It is just not wise to copy things into Onshape while you probably already have some online file server syncing all your stuff between devices and you could simply have a link in your cad document to quickly access relative data.

- Building decent UI (to all platforms) would take a lot of hours away from building better cad. I wan't awesome cad rather than decent file share.

_Ðave_

I agree that in the current state Onshape is not a very efficient means of storing project data for all the reasons mentioned. I would also mention ( if someone is watching/listening) that the Organization list in the far left side would be greatly improved if it was sorted Alpha numerically. Also adding subgroups or whatever you wish to call them would help in finding documents.

 What good is the greatest cad program if you can't find your documents! I was once told that It will do you no good to have all the tools imaginable if you thrown them all in a barrel. This is what its starting to feel like as i rack up more and more documents.