What’s New, October 1st, 2023

Welcome to OpenBOM’s October 1st, 2023 update. The update brings changes in the OpenBOM free subscription and tons of new updates, improvements, and bug fixes. 

It is a big day for all our users looking to use OpenBOM Design for free (!). I’m sure you’re as excited as I am. All free users in OpenBOM are getting Design Project cloud PDM functionality with unlimited Design Projects including an unlimited number of projects and unlimited storage. You can register to OpenBOM and start using it completely free. 

To get more information about Design Projects, you can check our documentation online and check our previous “What’s new, September 17, 2023”. Also, note that all BOM management functionality now requires a Team subscription. But you can try it for 14 days. 

In the following video, you can see the new registration process with step-by-step instructions – how to register, how to use Workspace Manager and start a 14-day trial. 

Design Workspace Manager

The OpenBOM Design Workspace Manager sees more improvements with this release. It brings a better user experience, log messages, and new locate functionality allowing you to open a Project directly from the Workspace Manager. 

However, the really BIG THING will be coming soon in the next update with the introduction of “Smart Sync” functionality allowing bidirectional synchronization between cloud projects and local folders without thinking about what files need to be uploaded and what files need to be downloaded. It will include an exclusive file-locking mechanism. 

Read more about it here – OpenBOM Design Projects with Smart Sync. 

Move Item has been returned

Back by popular demand, the Move-Item command. Here is the original video:

The command will now properly warn you that items with revision and sourcing information cannot be moved.  We will continue to improve this feature.

CAD Add-ins and Integrations

OpenBOM for Autodesk Fusion 360

We are pleased to announce we have released an update in support of the September 19th  2023 release of Autodesk Fusion360.  

If you have any issues please consult the OpenBOM Community post below.

OpenBOM for PTC Onshape

OpenBOM has supported the Onshape Category for many years (view the initial announcement video here. We recently added the ability to bring the internal Onshape Category value to your Items and BOMs.  For example, HARDWARE, or MOLDING, or whatever your Category values are.

Check your Settings and send the Category to OpenBOM Items.

OpenBOM for PTC Creo

With this release, we now support the “CAD Revision” workflow in Creo.  This means you can now manage the revision value for your individual CAD files much more easily in OpenBOM.  The value of Revision form Creo may optionally be saved to the “CAD_Revision” property in OpenBOM.

You can watch the video of how it works here:

Other Fixes and Improvements

As always, we squashed a few bugs and made a few smaller improvements. 

• No longer incorrectly show the insufficient storage message in CAD
• Fixed the case when the “null” value was exported to Excel
• Some CAD inner browsers did not show the properly selected sublevel 
• Some CAD inner browsers mistakenly displayed the OpenBOM dashboard

Conclusion: 

I’m super excited about the new release giving FREE CLOUD PDM functionality for all OpenBOM users. It is a big deal and in my opinion, will make the lives of many engineers and companies much easier. 

I’m sure you will appreciate new improvements in CAD add-ins and restoring some other functionality such as Move Item…which was requested by many. 

REGISTER FOR FREE and start a free 14-day trial to explore OpenBOM functions in depth. 

Best, Oleg