Autodesk Manufacturing Community
“We selected a great vendor partner in SolutionSet. They seemed comfortable with the fast pace of our project and they particularly shined as they worked with us over the holiday weekend for the final push of coding, content uploading and bug fixing in order for us to make our deadline.”
— Tracey Stout, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Autodesk, Inc.
Client
Autodesk, Inc. is the world leader in 2D and 3D design software for the manufacturing, building and construction, and media and entertainment markets.
Challenge
Company wants to encourage talented product users to share ideas with each other and the company
Autodesk realized that their employees and users had a wealth of good ideas and tools to share with each other. The company wanted to create a site that would make exchanging these ideas rewarding, easy, and organized. With hundreds of thousands of users already utilizing the Autodesk discussion forums, the challenge was to entice individuals to interact with one another. Rather than information traveling solely from the company to the user, Autodesk wanted to create an environment for tips and techniques to travel from the user to the company and from user to user. What’s more is that the company wanted to showcase this concept at its annual conference, which meant for a limited timeline to implement these desires.
Solution
Online community platform tailored to a professional setting
SolutionSet had just three weeks from kickoff to the conference deadline to implement a community platform that would appeal to professionals. Under such a short timeline, they decided to use a robust third-party foundation, Drupal, and customize the features with custom PHP and MovableType integration. Once this community framework was in place, SolutionSet incorporated feeds for events, news, and discussion groups, and displayed these on the homepage. They also created customizable homepage content, which allows users to choose what types of information and geographic areas interest them. The final product: A complex community environment reflecting the users who would interact in it.
Results
Company was able to preview beta site at annual manufacturing conference
Live site launched to great success
Member-generated content continues to grow
Other community-themed portals are slated for the future
Technology Used
_xHTML/CSS
_PHP/MySQL
_JavaScript
_XML
_Perl
_Drupal implementation and customization
_MovableType implementation
Visit mfgcommunity.autodesk.com