Overview
Introduction
Individuals and companies around the globe work across disciplines and tools to create the awesome products, buildings, and experiences of today and those of the future. Collaborating seamlessly across those project teams and apps – many developed by Autodesk – has become more important than ever. Data Exchanges help you unlock your data and give you the flexibility to share the right bits with the right stakeholders at the right time – no matter the app or industry you work in.
You can think of Data Exchanges as a sort of Amazon Locker. Amazon provides customers with the item that they need, delivered directly to the locker they have access to, and they grab the item in a secure way at their leisure. You can play either role – producer or consumer of the item – or both!
Example Workflow
Consider how an architecture firm – for example, designing a hospital in Revit – might interact with one of their fabrication shops partners – who is responsible for, manufacturing the railing of the hospital staircases in Inventor. While the architect needs to share information – model geometry (for instance, stairwell dimensions) or metadata (for instance, wall material properties) with the fabricator, they might not want to share the entire hospital model or certain elements, perhaps to protect IP (Intellectual Property). The fabricator wants to receive only the data relevant to their work, in the app they use so they can focus more on the railing design and manufacturing and less on massaging the data they receive.
Both parties can leverage Data Exchanges to enhance collaboration between their teams and the specific apps they use every day. Exchanges act as neutral secure containers for subsets of data and can be shared with any number of apps connected into the ecosystem. In our example, the architect can designate, from their app of choice, the subset of data they want to share with the fabricator, that is the Data Exchange. The fabricator can then consume that data in the app they use. As the architect updates their model, Data Exchanges derived from that model automatically update, allowing the fabricator to take in the changes made in the upstream design process.