Ah the Inventor Revision Cloud. A common query of "Where the #!%$" is it?" The answer is usually that of Design Review. Design Review is a free program for viewing and marking up Autodesk DWFs. Now if you have lived under a rock for the last decade, you may not know what these are. That's okay, let's ask Wikipedia shall we. For those of you that know what a DWF is you may have found yourself spinning your wheels a little with its adoption.
For instance when you send a DWF out to a vendor/supplier/contractor you rely on them having an Autodesk product (since ALL Autodesk products come with this free viewer), if not then you rely on them downloading the free program which last time I checked is about 130 MB. Some shops still think the fax machine will never die and these are your trouble makers. Design what? Review Who? Just fax it we just changed our toner in the Panasonic. Yikes! Well they won the low bid so we move on and fax it to them. Well maybe we need them to look at something in the print for verification so we need our good old friend the Revision Cloud. In my previous post I talked about the SDK update for 2010 32 and 64 bit, make sure you have that. Then enjoy the video below...
Inventor Revision Cloud from Mark Flayler on Vimeo.
Now there are numerous other reasons why the Revision Cloud can be used. Such as your existing Data Management system may not be Vault (which can generate DWFs automatically) and it may require PDFs. This is something you might have to track and the only way to have it on the sheet is this tool. You may have to take something to a meeting quick and discuss an certain portion of the drawing with teammates and the Revision Cloud is the quickest way to showcase something without an enormous highlighter. Please guys, lets say the highlighters for college studying and making weird black light bottles.
Perhaps the only downside to Revision Clouds is the fact that sometimes, you just don't know who is going to get your design intent...