Onshape Product Development Platform adds four major releases

Onshape, the leading cloud product development platform, introduced four new releases during the first quarter of 2019. The automatic product updates, which are delivered to customers every three weeks, include new Release Management functionality, collaboration tool enhancements, CAD features, improvements to user interface and performance, bug fixes, and updates to Onshape Drawings and FeatureScript (the open-source programming language to create custom features).

“Our development team has its own roadmap for future product improvements, but Onshape highly prioritizes and quickly acts on our customer requests for new functionality,” says Paul Chastell, Onshape’s Vice President of R&D. “We’re proud to meet the challenges of product design teams using Onshape to improve communication and speed up their time to market.”

Topping the list, Onshape recently added Assembly Configurations which speed up and simplify the design of families of products that have different sizes, options, colors and other permutations. Onshape’s unique approach lets product designers create independent tables for each set of configurable items, dramatically reducing the number of table rows and cells.

Product designs can now be configured on-the-fly using variables to provide very large or even infinite numbers of variations with minimum configuration table complexity. With other CAD systems, complex configurations result in monster-sized tables that are tough to understand, troubleshoot and manage.

Other key Q1 product improvements

• Customizable Notifications for Release Management Workflows – Comments created by anyone on a pending Release Candidate now notify all those involved in the process (the creator of the Release Candidate, the Approver, and any Observers).
• New REST API Webhook Subscriptions – These now expand connections between Onshape and enterprise systems such as ERP and PLM.
• New Single Sign On (SSO) Support for Google Enterprise – Companies that use Google SSO can now enable this in Onshape. This is in addition to existing support for Okta.
• Extension of Onshape’s Comprehensive Edit History – Tab metadata changes now show in the Document history.
• Integration With Google Drive & Dropbox – You can now browse and search your Google Drive or Dropbox files from directly within Onshape and also import from and export to these services more easily.
• Adding the PEM Standard for Sheet Metal Fasteners – The PEM® Standard has been added to the library of Standard Content in Onshape. In addition, the Hole feature has been updated to automatically create the correct size mounting hole for any PEM part inserted into an assembly.
• View-only UI – Non-CAD users throughout a company now have a simpler interface with which to view and navigate live Onshape data.
• Swap Drawing Sheet Format in Onshape Drawings – When changes are made to an Onshape drawing template (DWT), there is now an easy way to update the title block and border for existing Onshape Drawings.
• Custom Property Search – Searching from the Documents list now allows filtering by custom properties that were created in a company.
• Partial Boundaries for Loft, Fill – Improvements to loft and fill provide more flexibility in complex surfacing.