With Cloud CAD and PDM, Flexible Design for a Summer Coolcation

If 2022 was the year of “revenge travel” after travel restrictions were lifted, 2026 is the year of the “coolcation.”

With much of the U.S. and Europe baking through one of the hottest summers on record, travelers are doing something that would have sounded backward a few years ago: heading north, and up, to escape the heat.

Chasing cooler air is a great instinct. The trouble is that important work rarely pauses for your trip – a deadline lands, a teammate has a question, a design needs one more change.

For engineers tied to on-premise software, a heavy VPN, or a workstation that lives at the office, that means heading to Norway on a coolcation and getting real work done can’t happen at the same time.

PTC’s cloud-native CAD and PDM system changes that. Here are the Onshape features that let you – and your team – keep your cool to get important work moving from anywhere.

Work is Accessible Wherever a Browser Can Open

Whether you’re chasing the midnight sun or just dodging a heat dome with a staycation, a cloud-native engineering system means your location stops deciding whether you can work. There’s nothing to install, no license key to track down, no VPN tunnel to babysit.

All that’s needed is to open a browser, sign in, and your project is right there, as ready as your inbox, on any network – from a hotel lobby to a lake house.

Nobody’s suggesting you should be modeling poolside. But if a quick change can’t wait, it shouldn’t require flying home to a desktop. And because Onshape has no save button – every edit lands in version history automatically – stepping away is effortless. Close the lid mid-extrude, make your flight, and reopen to the exact state you left. Nothing to save, nothing to lose.

That also erases a whole category of IT overhead. For example, the team at medical device maker Loop Medical found close to a third of its engineers’ time had been disappearing into installs, reinstalls, and update headaches, and moving to Onshape handed it back.

The Cloud Does the Heavy Lifting, Keeping Your Laptop Cool

Anyone who’s run file-based CAD software on a laptop in July knows the experience of a fan screaming, the underside turning into a griddle, and suddenly your lap is part of the cooling system. That’s your local processor and graphics card straining to crunch geometry, rendering, and simulation – right when the weather is already doing its best to cook you.

Onshape flips that. The CAD and PDM system runs on AWS, and the heavy lifting – geometry computation, rendering, simulation, CAM toolpaths – happens on cloud servers, not your machine. Your browser simply displays the graphics that stream back. Even a large, complex assembly won’t turn your laptop into a space heater, because your device is essentially a window into the cloud rather than the thing doing the math.

That has a nice practical side effect for summer because the hardware in your bag can be light.

Any Device Can Become a Workstation

Because your machine is no longer doing the math, its specs stop mattering. A Chromebook, a tablet, or a five-year-old laptop performs like a high-end workstation, because the workstation is in the cloud. You can travel light and still open a large, complex assembly without a second thought about whether your hardware can keep up.

And when a laptop isn’t handy at all, the Onshape mobile apps for iOS and Android put your models in your pocket. From a hammock or an airport line, you can pull up a part, check a dimension, or approve a change in a couple of taps – enough to unblock a teammate or settle a quick question without ever opening

Your Team Keeps Moving Without You

You know the out-of-office ritual: a hasty handoff note with a phone number left “just in case.” The real dread usually isn’t being unreachable, but being the only person who knows where the latest version lives.

That’s a file-based CAD problem. When design data is siloed on one machine or buried in a folder only its owner understands, your time off becomes everyone else’s bottleneck.

Cloud-native Onshape removes the single point of failure since there’s one shared, always-current model, and anyone with access can pick up exactly where things stand – no frantic texts to your beach chair required.

Keep in Sync with Your Team

With Onshape, everyone can stay in sync whether or not you’re online.

Comments let a teammate ask a question directly on the part or dimension in question, and let you answer from wherever you are, so the conversation stays with the model rather than in a buried text thread.

When a question needs more than a comment, Follow Mode lets a colleague watch your screen live – your exact view, selections, and edits – turning a quick call into a real “here’s where I left it” walkthrough before you head off.

For everything that doesn’t come up at the moment, Document notes let you leave the reasoning behind a design right where the work lives. Instead of frantic teammates reverse-engineering your intent, the questions get answered, the context travels with the model, and your time off stays your time off.

Eureka Moments on Vacation Can Be Explored

Sometimes the best ideas come when you’re not doing anything design-related. So when inspiration hits, Onshape’s branching and merging abilities let you spin off a copy of a design, chase a wild idea, and merge it back only if it earns its place – all without touching the main model or anyone else’s progress.

It’s how a lean team can keep building something serious from anywhere. Edison Motors designs and builds its hybrid electric trucks in Onshape, iterating fast on one shared, live model instead of passing files around, so momentum never depends on everyone being in the same room.

Keep Everything Cool, but Design Momentum

Peak-season travel in 2026 brings its own friction with high temperatures, packed destinations, and peak pricing for almost everything.

While Onshape can’t shorten a security line or talk down a surge price, it can make the time you’re stuck somewhere count. Waiting at the gate, you can open a browser and push a real idea forward. Or even better, you finally relax as your teammates make progress with all the information they need at their fingertips.

So this summer, go chase the cool air. Onshape will be right there in the browser when you need it.