Just in time for the holidays...

One of the Autodesk Labs areas of focus this year is Rapid Application Delivery. We want to work with technologies that allow you to test drive our design applications more quickly. It is for this reason that we are looking at remoting technologies such as those on Project Twitch or streaming/sandbox technologies on Inventor Fusion and Project Vasari.

Yesterday we unveiled another one. Users in the United States who wish to evaluate AutoCAD LT 2011 can do so via a Citrix technology. A web version is offered as an alternative to a traditional download.

Click image to visit site.

The process is easy. You fill out a short form. You install a small Citrix client.

You then run AutoCAD LT on a remote server. You can work with your own files. You can print to your own printer. The performance is not exactly the same as a local installation, but it is easily sufficient enough to evaluate AutoCAD LT 2011 functionality. For subsequent test drives, you can use a shortcut that gets installed on your desktop.

As with any new technology preview, we start small, see how it goes, and then get bigger. We hope to expand to other geographies in the future.

Making it easy to try our applications is alive in the lab.