Over the past several years, text messaging has become an important tool for families, friends, and co-workers to stay in contact quickly and easily. More recently, it has also become a clutch way for people to communicate and collaborate on the job, oftentimes with group messages becoming a sort of on-the-go whiteboard for tossing around ideas or simply setting up meetings.

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Today, Autodesk is throwing its hat into the group messaging arena with its new app Autodesk Instant. It's a group SMS app that's aimed at the workplace, which aims to make it easy to talk to a team of people all at the same time. It features message, photo, and video sharing, along with location tags (for easy meet ups), one-on-one messaging (like regular SMS), and "seamless communication with coworkers who don't have the app installed" – assumedly because it's just sending out a standard SMS.

Now, the first thought that may grace one's mind is "I already have an SMS app, why do I need this?" This could be a simple and easy way of keeping work separate from play, and personal contacts away from professional. This practice could also eliminate accidentally sending an "inappropriate" message to a coworker when it was meant for someone else. We all know how embarrassing that can be.

Autodesk Instant is a free app with no in-app purchases, and it's also available for iOS devices. Hit the widget to give it a try.

The app was not found in the store. :-(