Many Autodesk products can be heavily customized to support different workflows, including product settings, custom extensions, and updates. If you’re working in a managed environment, or you have been customizing products yourself for years, you might want to pre-configure your products before you install them. This maintains consistency in your environment and makes sure that the first-time launch experience is set up exactly how you want it. In the past, you would download the product and customize it during install or create a deployment. With our new installation technology, you can now customize your products, then download a pre-configured installer. This offers a lot of flexibility. We’ll spend the rest of this post discussing deployments, but all of the capabilities are available for custom installs as well. Let’s talk about how this is faster, easier, and more reliable. Click here for a recap of how we got here and how we make decisions.
How is it Faster?
In the past, you had to download products in order to customize them. If you owned a Suite, that could mean up to 60GB of data you needed to download, just to even get started. Now, with our online workflow, you select the products and settings you want, and we only download what you selected. The downloads happen faster because we download multiple streams at the same time. For a Revit deployment, creating the deployment is 3x faster than the older Deployment Wizard.
How is it Easier?
We’ve heard a lot of feedback about how hard it was to include updates in deployments. You now have the ability to include updates while you’re configuring the deployment. By using the Latest version option, we will automatically include any updates needed to get your install to most up-to-date version, and your deployments will always be up to date. You now have the ability to include multiple products in a single deployment, so you can create deployments for specific groups of users and include the products they use most. For products with multiple language packs, such as AutoCAD and Inventor, you can include multiple languages in the same deployment, eliminating the need to create one deployment for each language.
How is it More Reliable?
When installing a deployment, particularly with multiple products, often the product updates and extensions need to be installed in a specific order. We have spent a lot of effort to make sure that installs happen in the proper sequence every time so that they install reliably. For example, pre-requisites for all products are installed before any products are installed, and updates or extensions will install last. This increases the installation success for all installed products and components.
The new deployment and custom install workflow is online, so we can always add new features and new capabilities at any time, and we have many plans to do just that. With the old deployment wizard, we couldn’t add enhancements more than once a year, and it just wasn’t agile enough. Now, all of the enhancements we add on a regular basis can make your installs even faster, easier, and more reliable. We realize this can be a big transition, and maybe not every feature you’re expecting will be available right away. We invite you to give it a try and send us feedback if you have any ideas about how we can improve.
