BIM Chapters: Autodesk to Offer BIM 360 Design Free Until May 31, 2020

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Autodesk to Offer BIM 360 Design Free Until May 31, 2020

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the entire world, Autodesk offers some relief for challenges facing many AEC firms. They are offering free use of BIM 360 Design, for commercial use, until May 31, 2020!

Using BIM 360 Design allows staff to work from a company laptop (named user license, checked out network license) or a home computer (named user license or home use license) and work directly against the BIM 360 Design project in the cloud and not have to connect to an office server at all!

We use CTC Software's Hive to host all out content in the cloud as well. Avail and Unfi may also support cloud-host content.

Keep reading to learn more...

I have posted a lot about BIM 360 Design on this blog over the last year as my firm as completely switched over all Revit project, and we only do building projects in Revit, to BIM 360 Design. Please search this site for tips if you are new to BIM 360 Design... I hope to publish more 'getting started' tips soon.

Warning: BIM 360 Design is supposed to support Civil 3D projects. I have been testing this over the last week and for whatever reason things have NOT been stable. I am working with ATG support and someone at Autodesk. First tests where amazing, but then when I tried getting others involved in the same project things feel of the rails quickly. I will report back if I have any updates.

Here is some of the official info from Autodesk:

Official Autodesk information can be found here: How Autodesk is helping customers and employees impacted by COVID-19

To better support customers facing this new reality, Autodesk is announcing a temporary Extended Access Program for several of our flagship cloud collaboration products. Let me be clear: we’re not introducing this program to convert customers into paying users. Our goal, instead, is to get a program up and running as quickly as possible to provide customers increased flexibility in what’s become a challenging work environment. Here’s how the program will work:

Beginning in the next several days, customers can get free access to select Autodesk products and services.

Products and services will include BIM 360 Docs, BIM 360 Design, Fusion 360, Fusion Team, AutoCAD Web and Mobile, and Shotgun – all for commercial use.

Customers can take advantage of this program by visiting Autodesk.com and following the steps they’d normally take to sign up for an Autodesk product trial on our website. We know this will be an imperfect experience in some ways but, as stated earlier, our goal is to give customers access to this program as quickly as possible. Leveraging our existing product trial experience on Autodesk.com is the most effective way to do this.

Customers can take advantage of the Extended Access Program until May 31, 2020. However, we will continue to evaluate a potential expansion of this program as the needs of our customers warrant.

What is particularly amazing about this, as I understand it, all of the cloud services are hosted on Amazon's AWS... meaning it is not free to Autodesk. Perhaps they worked out a deal with Amazon to be able to offer this much needed relief.

Update: I create a video and uploaded it to YouTube describing how to set up a Revit project in BIM 360 Design. Check it in this post:

Introduction to Setting up Revit Projects in Autodesk BIM 360 Design - YouTube Video

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