Upchain is a cloud product data management (PDM) solution in the Autodesk product lifecycle management (PLM) portfolio of products. To give Upchain customers access to new functionality faster and improve the quality of service, Autodesk has changed its Upchain product release cycle from a quarterly update to a progressive rollout. This means that Upchain customers will see new features and enhancements in a progressive and ongoing basis, eliminating the impact of releasing many features and fixes all at once and allowing customers to enjoy the stability of more incremental releases on a more frequent basis.
This post summarizes new functionality and fixes that were rolled out over the course of several weeks in August. Watch the video to see some of the features in action and read on to learn more about what’s new in Upchain.
Upchain August Update Highlights
Author Enhancements
BOM Wizard improvement for item type selection
Users can now manage a BOM (Bill of Materials) structure more effectively in the plugin by reviewing and then also changing the item type directly in the BOM Wizard window, during the import process.
Participant Enhancements
Upchain localization support for Korean and German
We have enabled localization support for Korean and German language, for both web and plugins. The support also includes localized user documentation.
For web, you can change the language preference using your browser language settings. The plugin adopts the Windows language settings found in Windows Settings > Time & Language > Region > Regional format.
New Upchain theme
We have improved the user experience with a new design theme that is focused on improving readability and clarity, while also modernizing the design. The overall site functionality did not change because of the new design, and users have the option to try the new theme but can switch back at any time. The areas we covered with the new theme are dashboards, business processes, projects, and search.
Release flow for Item Variations
Upchain now provides increased release manager efficiency and release package accuracy by providing a control and option to release items in one release even when an eBOM (engineering BOM) is not the same as a cBOM (design BOM).
Quorum decision in document workflow
Users can now enhance the document workflow with the quorum decision ability where users would either approve or reject the document publish based on the custom number of users required to vote.
Obsolete items ignored during release process
During the release process, children with obsolete status under released parents will be ignored, making the release of above development assemblies faster and more efficient. Users can decide if it is required to update the released assemblies to incorporate the latest obsolete item versions, but the system will not make this a requirement.
Supplier information added to BOM export
For users using the BOM export capability from Upchain web, we now include the supplier name information on the exported report document. For each item containing this information, the supplier will be included automatically.
Administrative Enhancements
Automated tenant creation for new customers
Customers that purchased Upchain subscription(s) and do not have a tenant/hub yet created, can now create one themselves and start with user invites, without the need to wait on Autodesk support. Information about the process can be found here.
New Upchain theme – administration
Finding and filtering data in the Upchain administration is now more convenient and efficient than ever, with new capabilities in administration tables like show or hide specific column and filter columns based on their values in combination with standard operators like contains, equals, etc. We have started with this improvement and more and more tables are going to be updated over upcoming releases.
Performance Updates
The activity stream within the user dashboard and project dashboard will now load up to 4x faster.
We have also optimized checks for obtaining the edit lock and cBOM information in the latest working filter for web and plugin.
Learn more
See previous Upchain product updates here.
See release notes for the latest Upchain version as well as previous releases in the Autodesk help center here.
Visit the Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage with Upchain product center here.
Visit our PLM solution center here.
Share your feedback
Many of these enhancements were made because of user requests. To make sure we’re working on your priorities, be sure to give us your feedback. You can join the following communities to share feedback and product improvement requests with Autodesk’s Upchain product team:
Upchain Ideas – Submit your ideas for improvements and new features.
Upchain Forums – Discuss Upchain with our technical teams and your peers.