Onshape’s versioning provides real-time, granular tracking of every historical design change, allowing users to view, compare, and restore designs without challenge. This sets us apart from other systems while alleviating the disorder that comes with managing multiple tools and ensuring that all team members – no matter where they might be in the world – are working with the latest design iteration.

This powerful versioning system forms the backbone of Onshape’s collaborative design environment. Building on this foundation, we've continued to refine and enhance Onshape’s capabilities to meet our users’ evolving needs.

We're thrilled to highlight a series of recent enhancements related to versioning, branching and merging, and all of those data-management-related tools you love to use in Onshape. These improvements help provide clarity to these powerful features in Onshape. The updates focus on improving workspace management, enhancing real-time collaboration, and making the entire process more predictable. Let's dive in! 

Real-Time Updates and Enhanced Merge Visualization/Process

Collaboration is consistently recognized as one of Onshape's most treasured features, so it's no surprise we're eager to deliver more on this front. To that end, we're thrilled to introduce real-time updates to the Versions and History panel. With that and the improved merge visualization capabilities, collaborating across continents and across versions will see notable improvements. Let's explore these new features one by one. First up...

Real-Time Updates

While real-time, simultaneous updates and editing have been integral to the design space from day one, the same can’t be said of the Version and History panel. This changed when we brought those real-time updates to the Version and History panel. So whether you're adding branches, creating new versions, or merging changes, these updates are reflected in real-time, providing all team members with an up-to-date view of the project's progress. Nice! 


Merge Lines for Clearer Development Timelines

Then, to help improve the user experience, we’ve aimed to provide a clearer, high-level overview of your project's development timeline with “merge lines.” These lines visually represent the merging of branches, making it easier to track the evolution of your document and understand the flow of changes. Check out the video below for more details:


Improved Merging Process

Additionally, our merging process has been redesigned to ensure that combining branches with varying feature library versions is both smoother and more reliable. This enhancement minimizes conflicts and errors, providing a more seamless experience when integrating different branches into your main project.


These updates both came in Onshape 1.181, but we weren’t done yet! In the next release, Onshape 1.182, we added more capabilities, highlighted next…

Workspace Protection for Enhanced Security

In today's fast-paced design environment, maintaining the integrity of your production workspace is crucial. That's why we delivered the ability to do what’s called “Workspace Protection.” Using this feature, you can now safeguard your workspaces against unintentional changes, ensuring that your production environment remains stable and secure.

What’s Workspace Protection?

Enabling Workspace Protection on a branch prevents edits to that workspace. Changes can only be made through a merge from another branch. This feature ensures critical workspaces remain unaltered while allowing essential operations like release management, drawing updates, and version creation to proceed safely.

How Does It Work?

By providing a more deliberate workflow, Workspace Protection ensures that only intentional changes are implemented. This goal for this protection was made with the integrity of your production environment in mind. It shouldn’t restrict users from making necessary updates; instead, it channels these updates through a trackable merge process, minimizing the risk of errors. See the following video for more details:


Managing Workspace Protection

  • Free, Standard, and Professional Licenses: Any user with edit permissions for the document can enable or disable Workspace Protection within that document.

  • Enterprise Licenses: A new global permission has been introduced with the creation of this feature. Similar to the above cases, users need edit access to documents in order to enable or disable Workspace Protection.

Embrace the New Onshape Experience

These updates are designed to enhance your Onshape experience – especially related to versioning, and branching and merging – by providing greater control and improving clarity.  We believe these enhancements will not only make your workflow more efficient but also give you the confidence to innovate without compromising on stability.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to improve and expand all of Onshape's capabilities.

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