Tag Archives: Migration

CAD Managers, please do this survey

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Autodesk has issued another survey, this time asking questions about AutoCAD customisation, migration and deployment. Anybody who has to manage AutoCAD or its variants knows that these areas contain some major pain points and have needed serious attention for some years. It looks like Autodesk is finally considering paying some attention, so it’s important to make sure the right kind of attention is being paid.

It’s a fairly large survey (allow yourself half an hour to do it justice) and some of the questions are imperfect in traditional Autodesk survey fashion (especially the “Other” boxes, which don’t provide enough space). But if you are at all interested in improving your experience and that of your users when introducing future new releases of AutoCAD (and its variants; changes to AutoCAD should flow on), I urge you to spend the time and fill in the survey.

Do you think Migration sucks?

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I do. If you’ve added a couple of toolbars and changed a few settings, it’s probably fine for you. But I think it’s been effectively broken for significantly customised setups ever since Autodesk “improved” it by introducing the CUI mechanism in AutoCAD 2006. It’s undocumented and whenever I’ve tried it, unreliable. I ran some polls on it a couple of years ago which had few responses. What do you think now?

If you’re unhappy with migration, don’t just vent here. Autodesk now wants to hear from you. Here’s the announcement:

Dear AutoCAD User!

AutoCAD Product Design & Usability Team is looking for participants for the study.

Topic: focus on Migration process, Migration tool and results of migration.

Our Goal

To gain the most complete understanding about problems and requests AutoCAD users may have while migrating their settings and customization from a previous release of AutoCAD.

Who Should Participate?

We are looking for individual contributors or CAD managers with small number of seats (less than 5- either standalone or multi-seat standalone) with unsatisfying experience using Migration tool to migrate settings from a previous version of AutoCAD.

How the Study will be Conducted?

We will schedule ~1 h interview session with you (remotely) and discuss your experience with migration, results you expected, outcome you’ve got.

When?

We are planning research between May 27 and June 2, 2010.

How To Sign Up?

Please submit qualification data and indicate your availability here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MigrationSignUp

I’m a bit concerned about the restriction of this study to individual users and CAD managers with a handful of users, as I would have thought CAD managers with significant numbers of users would be the least satisfied group, and the group with the greatest need for a working Migration system. However, as with other such Autodesk research, I encourage your participation.

AutoCAD Migration – continued

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I have added two more polls (see right) about this subject making a total of four. I have an inkling that the people most dissatisfied with Migration are those with many users to support, and I’m interested to know how accurate that impression is.

If you voted that you were totally or generally dissatisfied with Migration, please use the top poll, otherwise use the second poll. If you haven’t voted yet in the satisfied/dissatisfied poll, please do! I’ll keep these polls open for a while.

Feel free to add your comments here to expand on what you have selected in the polls.

AutoCAD Migration – what do you think?

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For a few years now, AutoCAD has allowed you to migrate your settings forward from an old release to a new one. Since AutoCAD 2006, this has included your custom CUI stuff.

How well is this mechanism working for you? I will keep my opinions to myself for now, but I’m interested in yours. I have added two polls about this (see right) and have more polls on this subject waiting in the wings. Feel free to add your comments here to expand on what you have selected in the polls.