Autodesk Knowledge Network reviewed

Here’s the new Autodesk Knowledge Network where you can “access a broad range of knowledge to help you get the most out of your Autodesk products and services”.

One nice thing when searching for downloads is that you can use Narrow Results to filter out for example only a specific version or type of download like hotfixes, object enablers or service packs. It works the same with the troubleshooting section.

So I checked the AutoCAD troubleshooting result and found this link that offers not help and seems to be from the forums. Strange. It would be good to see forum results too but it should be possible to filter out as well.

“Autodesk invites you to share your knowledge with the rest of the world, inspiring others to learn, achieve goals, and ignite creativity. In collaboration with Creative Commons, Autodesk invites you to share your knowledge with the rest of the world, inspiring others to learn, achieve goals, and ignite creativity. You can freely borrow from the Autodesk Help, Support and Video libraries to build a new learning experience for anyone with a particular need or interest.” Note that this seems to apply only for noncommercially purpose. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) and Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works (CC BY-NC-ND)  is used.

But there is a problem. If I for example visit this AutoCAD page I cannot find anywhere how to access the online help for AutoCAD. Even if I visit the Knowledge Network page for AutoCAD here. Hopefully this will be corrected soon. I did a search for AutoCAD documentation and got this link that seems to be taken from a blog post as can also be seen in the URL …/blog/autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/201…

Another noteworthy thing is that “as of February 1st, 2015, upgrades from previous releases will only be available with Subscription, the most cost-effective way to stay current. Upgrade and subscribe now to gain additional savings on our latest software with all the benefits of Subscription.” More here.

After this update a lot of the direct links that before work are now broken. Before this URL format was working: http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=DL22867787 and now when searching for something like DL22867787 will not show up any result. This will break a lot of links existing on the web and even on Autodesk’s own blogs. Not sure if this will be fixed eventually or not.

Head over to http://knowledge.autodesk.com and see what you think about these updates.

UPDATE: I found that some of the old URLs to technical solutions and other pages are working and later on the Up and Ready blog said: “most of the solutions do indeed work and have proper re-directs”.