Well as most of you know by now, the much anticipated event has concluded in San Diego and many have already returned home or are on their way home. Well SolidWorks World ended on Wednesday but did end without a bang.

Wednesday morning began much like the other 2 with the general session in the 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM time slot. Rainer Gawlick opened the session much like he did Monday morning. It did not take long before Rainer was joined on stage by Bill Mitchell from Microsoft to receive a complimentary thank you gift for being a platinum sponsor of SWW. Dean Kamen, brainchild behind US FIRST and inventor of the Segway, then took over the crowd and stage with a introduction to what US FIRST is all about and asked the 4.700 people in attendance to look at volunteering and help develop the next generation of engineers by creating a local US FIRST Group. After Dean finished up his presentation it was an onslaught of awards and short presentations from multiple people. Bruce Holway was the first up with a group of 10 others to announce the Top 10 Enhancement Requests of SWW 2008. I am not very good at writing extremely fast so check out the list here or here. Then it was on onslaught of awards and winners, here they are (if I spelled anyone’s name wrong, please accept my apologies)

2008 User Group of the Year – Presented by Richard Doyle

SolidWorks User Group of Chennai India

2008 User Group Leader of the Year – Presented by Richard Doyle

Gerald Davis – Colorado SolidWorks User Group

SWUGN Lifetime Achievement Award – Presented by Richard Doyle

Mark Peters

Design Contest Winners – Presented by Joe Dunne

Grand Prize – WIYN Observatory

2nd – Naber Plastics B.V.

3rd – Page Product Design, Inc.

4th – Feature Factory

Customer Model Mania – Presented by Mark Schneider

1st – Ed Eaton

2nd – Chris Serran

3rd – Andrea Blom Blakke

Reseller Model Mania – Presented by Mark Schneider

1st – Darin Grosser

2nd – Neil Custard

3rd – John MacArthur

P.S. – Darin and John both work for my reseller DASI Solutions. Way to do us proud guys!

The next portion of the general session was the much anticipated SolidWorks 2009 preview. There was a buzz in the crowd when this got under way. Here is a brief list of some things that we all have to look forward to in the 2009 release.

1. SpeedPak in Assemblies

2. Updated Sketch Tools – Auto dimension during sketch, slot tool

3. Solid to Sheet Metal

4. Lip/Groove feature for Plastic parts

5. BOM’s in Assemblies

6. Negative Dimensions & Stretch Tool

7. Sensors

8. Toolbox – live fastener sizing

9. Magnifier Option

10. Measure in Dual Units

11. ***YOU WILL NOW BE ABLE TO MOVE THE COMMAND MANAGER***

12. Bolt Sizing Validation

13. Harness Ribbon Cable

14. New Detailing Tools & Title Block Wizard

Austin O’Malley then jumped on stage to give a little performance comparison of SolidWorks 2009 versus SolidWorks 2008. Unbelievable! Stay tuned for these wonderful upgrades. It is wonderful to see SolidWorks focusing more on performance this year and less on bling. Jeff Ray then made the next big announcement, everyone in unison please grab you calendars and mark February 8-11, 2009 as busy for SolidWorks World 2009 – to be held at the Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin Resort. Can you say – 381 days until SWW 2009!

After the general session I headed over to the Phil Sluder and Ed Eaton show, well I think it was actually titled Sluder and Eaton take on your Design Problems. This was a fantastic session with a ton of tips and tricks to go around, they even showed one of Anna Wood’s parts, sorry you had to miss it Anna. These 2 guys are great and very intelligent SolidWorks users.

After lunch I headed off to my next breakout session. This time I decided to hit up Greg Jankowski’s CAD Manager Survival Guide. This session could and should have been in the 1 1/2 hour time slot instead of an hour, or I should have just attended the CAD Manager’s Boot Camp that was held for 4 hours on Sunday. Anyway, Greg did a wonderful job of giving some tips and tricks to have a successful implementation of SolidWorks and a smooth running workflow once you have it. Wonderful session.

The last breakout session for my SolidWorks World agenda was by Richard Doyle titled No Red Pencil Required: Using the SolidWorks Design Checker. Richard did a great job on this session by laying out exactly how to use this little known and probably even lesser used tool. Nice work Richard with this session.

In conclusion, at least for this post, I wanted to thank all who presented at this years event and even more thanks to all the people that introduced themselves to me. Nancy Buchino, Laura Kozikowski and Darby Johnson did an unbelievable job setting ALL of the press stuff and schedule up. I will never forget my 1st SolidWorks World because of all 3 of you. What a wonderful time and stay tuned (probably next week) for a complete SWW review from a RockSolid Perspective. Until then, ciao!

P.S. Everyone NEEDS to check out the other Bloggers sites (links on the left) to get an awesome description/view, with pictures, of this year’s SWW.

Well its Tuesday already and it seems like the conference has flown past. Today was full of surprises, go figure. SolidWorks continued to amaze all of the event attendees.

This morning once again started with the general session which was held from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM. Today the event started with Bertrand Sicot (E.V.P. of Worldwide Sales) giving the opening comments of the session. Quite soon after the opening remarks Bertrand was joined on stage by Tom Salomone from Hewlett Packard. After Tom made a few remarks and exited the stage Jeremy Luchini was summoned to the stage by Bertrand. Jeremy, who is the Certification Program Manager for SolidWorks, gave a brief breakdown of what was happening this year with certifications. 1 out of 5 attendees of this years SolidWorks World is a CSWP, needless to say that is amazing. Some may ask why should you get certified, well that is easy, it is a fantastic way to prove yourself to potential employers. Jeremy told a story of a guy that he met at the CSWP event that was in the running for a job against 5,000 other potential employees. Well this guy took it upon himself to take the CSWP exam and in his portfolio he included designs that he had completed before he got certified, his certification certificate and his designs from after he got certified. Well to make a long story semi short, he got the job. Jeremy also announced during his speech that Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks (stay tuned for an one on one interview I have scheduled with him) took the test and received his CSWA certification. Jeremy at the end of his time on stage showed off the surf board that is signed by all of the CSWP’s in attendance and this will be on display at SolidWorks Corporate Headquarters. Dr. Don Norman followed Bertrand and Jeremy on stage. Dr. Norman gave an awesome presentation that was based around 4 Rules To Design By, the rules are Think People, Make It Usable, No Signs and Make It Beautiful. Dr. Normans presentation was filled with insight and comic relief. What a riot this guy seems to be. Dr. Norman was followed by Dr. Robert Ballard. Dr. Ballard is known for his underwater exploration, especially known for his exploration of the Titanic. This guy was awesome and very informative. After Dr. Ballard was done with his presentation he invited 5 members of the Long Beach City College ROV team to join his on stage and give the attendees an idea of what they were doing with SolidWorks. After these students left the stage SolidWorks dropped its bombshell on all of its attendees. SolidWorks launched a new program, you can check it out here: SolidWorks iPod. Well SolidWorks never leaves (well not normally) its customers hanging so they handed out iPod nano’s to all of this years SolidWorks World attendees. That is amazing!

After the general session I attended a portion of one of the most anticipated sessions for this years event, Stump the Chump. You can get a detail by detail breakdown of this event from some of the other bloggers. Need I say this session was full of comic relief and tremendous insight. I have heard a lot positive comments about this from a wide group of attendees.

The next time slot was the ever amazing lunch break which the SolidWorks Blog Squad got to have a personal meeting with Jeff Ray. It was great that Jeff could take a moment from his busy schedule and meet with us, it was greatly appreciated by all the members of the blog squad. I do have to say there was an awkward situation between Mike Puckett and Jeff when the subject of Mike’s blog post from yesterday came up, way to go Mike.

After this meeting I headed off to my next breakout session which was Methodologies for Assembly of Tool Design Automation which was presented by C.H. Lai. Mr. Lai is employed by 3D Quick Tools. It was an interesting session but was at times hard to follow, but it did provide an interesting view on certain things.

The next session that I attended was Drag, Drop, Snap, Smile presented by Matthew Cummins. This was again an outstanding presentation on a great subject. I heard from a SWW attendee after this session that it was the best presentation that he had seen thus far at the conference. It goes back to what I said yesterday, if you get the chance to attend a session by Matthew, DO IT!

Well, its time to go to the offsite event. Stay tuned tomorrow for more insight on the events from San Diego.

As you read in the 1st of this 2 part series you got a background into what Jon Hirschtick’s upbringing was like. Well we are now at the point where Jon was noticing some trends developing in the CAD industry and developing the formula for SolidWorks. It was a 3 part formula – 3D, Microsoft Windows and the business model that Autodesk used. After seeing this formula Jon began to work out of his house, beginning to lay out the new software and a month later he called another co-founder and yet a month later another co-founder. Well these 3 guys were all working out of their houses and took turns hosting meetings every couple of days to touch base with how everything was going. This setup was beginning to get difficult so they decided that they needed an office, with no capital. Jon himself, co-founder of SolidWorks went 13 months without an income all in an effort to establish the software as we know it today. I asked Jon if he had any inclination that SolidWorks would be where it is today and he said in regards to the relative position in the industry, his answer was yes. He always felt that this would be big, he told people that they were going to be the largest user of this technology in the future. He was telling people that SolidWorks would be the biggest user of component technologies for CAD ever. The one thing Jon admitted that he didn’t foresee was how big the world market would be, that it would expand so much that they could have over 700,000 licenses out there and there is still people that are using 2D design software that have never seen SolidWorks. The first years orders totaled around 12 million dollars so as you can see a lot of people jumped on board right away with this new software. Jon was a fantastic interview with awesome insight into a wide variety of issues, be sure to say hi to Jon and introduce yourself if you see him in passing, he is a great guy.

Stay tuned for more from San Diego!

Monday is the day the conference gets going full circle. This is when the general session and the 100+ breakout sessions kick off.

The first event of the day (after breakfast) was the general session which was held from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM. As a member of the press I had the opportunity to sit front (at least the front section) and center for this opening event. Rainer Gawlick (Vice President of Worldwide Marketing) opened the session by given an overview of this years event. He then handed it off to Jeff Ray (CEO of SolidWorks) who started by comparing it to the 1956 Austin Healy that he owned as a teenager. This car taught him the things like what it takes to design and that design is meaningless without performance and that car performance=excitement. The Design Performance of SolidWorks equals speed, excitement, reliability and support. He then threw some numbers out there like customer satisfaction right now is at 90% which is good but that still means that 1 person out of 10 is not happy which is unacceptable. After this there were 3 SolidWorks employees that joined Jeff on stage to give some insight to us what was happening internally at SolidWorks. Jeff then introduced the addition of 3DVia Composer to the SolidWorks family. This was then followed by some product showcase items that were designed in SolidWorks like the BigBelly Solar Powered Trash Can, ReWalk and Proton Therapy Solutions. Mike Brezette and Joel Carter, from Revell Inc. and Innovation First respectively the joined Jeff on stage to introduce the VEXplorer to the SolidWorks World attendees. I touched on the SolidWorks partnership yesterday when we were introduced at the Press Sessions. Jeff Ray then had introduced the 1st mystery guest at SolidWorks World, Danny Forster from the hit TV show Build It Bigger. Danny covered a variety of different architectural masterpieces ranging form the home of the Arizona Cardinals to some masterpieces around the world. The KIVA Systems robot was introduced to the audience by delivering a bottle of water to Danny during his presentation. This is a robot that works in conjunction with other robots in warehouse settings to provide a quicker way of getting products off the shelf and into the packaging so that it can be delivered to your doorstep, all designed in SolidWorks of course. These machines were then followed by a man named Theo Jansen (creator of the Beach Beasts) who himself knows a thing or two about making things work in conjunction with each other. I don’t think that I could even do justice trying to explain these “creatures”, so you will need to check them out yourself on YouTube. This wrapped up the first general session of SolidWorks World 2008.

After the general session I took a quick moment to check out the press conference that Danny Forster held for the press members and then off to to the press room for my interview with Greg Jankowski.

Finishing up my interview with Greg a little before lunch I headed back to the hotel room to do some fill in work before the afternoon activities kicked off. Right after lunch I had the opportunity to attend my first breakout session of the conference, so I decided to sit in on How To Create a Best Practices Document given by Jeff Sweeney, Engineering Data Specialist at 3DVision. This was a packed house session with not a seat to be had or a wall to lean on. Jeff did a fantastic job laying out the basics of what should be included in a best practices document.

After this session I had my second interview of the day scheduled as I got to sit down one on one with Jon Hirschtick. You can read all about it in part 1 of the series here.

The last time frame for the day at the conference was free for me so I took the opportunity to sit in on Matthew Cummins session titled Planning for Change: Tips and Tricks for Design Automation. This was a great session that gave a lot of information on where you can start to look for things to automate. Matthew gives a great presentation and any time you get the chance to hear him, make sure you take advantage of that opportunity.

My night ended up at the Wavehouse for the CSWP dinner. This was a wonderful event with plenty of food, drinks and fellowship for all. We even all got a special gift, can you say SolidWorks on a flash drive. How unbelievable is that. I will now be able to go anywhere that has a computer running Windows XP and be able to plug my flash drive in and start designing. SolidWorks is amazing.

Well off I go to start my Tuesday schedule. Stay tuned to hear all about what is happening here in San Diego.

P.S. Be sure to check the other blogs for great articles and awesome pictures. See everyone later.

It is still Monday and I am already 2/3 done with the One on One Interviews that I had scheduled. As I wrote this morning I had my One on One with Greg Jankowski that went extremely well and was very informative. This afternoon I had the chance to sit down with Jon Hirschtick and discuss some of the history of SolidWorks, what his upbringing was in programming and how SolidWorks got started. As a kid he had no mechanical stuff in his childhood. He grew up and went to high school in Chicago but was not involved in any technical classes during this time, only a drafting class. The one thing he mentioned from his childhood was that his father taught him how to treat your customers. His father sold stamps on the weekends to collectors and from this Jon had it wired in very early to treat your customers right and with respect. When he was in high school he became interested in electronics and ordered some kits from catalogs (yes catalogs, not the Internet) and from this kind started to get his feet wet with some technological things. While in high school he saw an ASR 33 Teletype that peaked his curiosity and started learning some of the computer programming basics from this. So now you may be wondering where did the CAD come from, well I was too and we have a fellow by the name of Byron Bloch to thank for this. Byron is Jon’s uncle and one day he asked Jon what he was going to study in college and Jon answered that he was going to study computers. Well Uncle Byron had other ideas and said no, no, no and paged through the course catalog that Jon had and pointed out the Mechanical Engineering classes. So Jon majored in Mechanical Engineering and in the summer of 1981 he got a job at Computervision. Well on the first day he met a fellow by the name of Tommy Lee (no, not the Tommy Lee you are thinking of), this Tommy Lee was a quiet, wise, respected guy from China, well as time progresses and we get full circle Tommy Lee just retired and he was a co-founder of SolidWorks. Well going back a little so that we don’t get ahead of ourselves the vision for SolidWorks came from seeing what was happening in the CAD industry. Jon was a co-founder of a 2D CAD company called Premise, Inc. and from this saw the same stuff that Pro-E and other CAD companies where seeing and thus we have the seed that started SolidWorks. To Be Continued…

Be sure to check back for Part 2 on how SolidWorks was formed from this background.

Well it is Monday at SolidWorks World 2008 and this morning I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Jankowski. Greg is the author of such books as SolidWorks For Dummies (1st and 2nd Edition) and SolidWorks for AutoCAD Users. I wanted to sit down with him and ask what advice he would give to someone that has been designing with a 2D CAD software for anywhere from 10-30 years and they are now switching over to SolidWorks. I found his response to be extremely accurate. He said that they need to first take a 1/2 step back before they can take a step forward in using the software. What this means is that from the way that they design in the 2D environment they need to take a step backward and look at the advantages of designing it in a 3D environment. But you need to understand the tools that are available to you in SolidWorks, and you can accomplish this through proper training classes. This was an awesome piece of advice that I will be able to connect to other situations in the future for a wide variety of issues that may come up. The interview then turned towards more of Greg’s duties now in regards to the SolidWorks User Community. If you browse through the SolidWorks Discussion Forum at all you will probably see that Greg is quite active on there (not always for the funnest reasons). There has been a lot of work done by SolidWorks employees to dig into what the users are experiencing and what kind of issues they are having, it also sounds that this will be a continued focus for SolidWorks to build a better bridge between the users and the programmers. We discussed how active and amazing the community of users is, Greg described it as a family reunion when he comes to SolidWorks World because of all the relationships that he has built at past SWW’s. Greg was a great interview, very open and enlightening into some of the behind the scenes stuff that goes on at SolidWorks.

SolidWorks World officially kicked off for me today with a wonderful mix of presentations by some of the greatest minds at SolidWorks Corporation. Today I attended the Press Breakout Sessions.

The first session I attended was given by Jeff Ray – the CEO of SolidWorks, he covered kind of the What’s Happening at SolidWorks Corporation session. He started off his presentation by announcing that this year SolidWorks World has 4,400 attendees which is up from 3,600 a year ago in New Orleans. After this he went into and touched on a variety of issues one of them being what is going to change at SolidWorks Corporation now that he is the CEO and what will stay the same. He answered this both ways – he said that first off nothing will change because the focus remains the same, there are still over 2 million users that are still using 2D CAD software that need to be introduced to 3D modeling. He then followed that up by saying that everything is going to change, there are still fixes that need to be made to the software to make it, dare I say, perfect. A bit of information that I found interesting is that it is a requirement of the SolidWorks executives to make customer visits on a yearly basis and sit in a corner and observe how the users are using the software, observe what kind of issues they are having and what features they are using. He also said that the main focus of the 2009 release will be on performance, which is a smart move after the UI changes and some of the issues that have arisen from the 2008 release. At the end of his presentation he had a Q & A session which covered a wide variety of topics, including one that stumped him from Josh Mings (what a trouble maker).

The second session attended today was a presentation on the Educational Efforts at SolidWorks which was given by Marie Planchard with some help from Scott Fraser (professor at Long Beach Community College) and a student of his. SolidWorks is getting involved in all of the areas of education ranging all the way from middle schools to universities, it is in 173 of the top 200 tech schools and in over 100 countries. A new initiative of SolidWorks is the CSWA test, which proves to potential employers that these college graduates are well schooled and can run SolidWorks effectively. It sounds to me like SolidWorks is on the right track of educating students early to get them interested in the software. A cool new partnership SolidWorks has formed is with IFI, Inc. and Revell, these three are teaming up to provide the VEXplorer robot package which includes a copy of the SolidWorks Student Edition software, very cool.

The third breakout session I attended today was given by Jon Hirschtick (who made a guest appearance at the Blog Squad event last night) that covered the History of CAD: the last 50 years. This was a very insightful presentation on where the CAD industry has been over the last 50 years and some things that Jon would like to see in the future. In the 1990′s the dream began for SolidWorks (Hirschtick is a co-founder of the software) with 3 visions for the company. First they wanted the ability to put the power of 3D CAD software on every engineers desktop computer, they didn’t want the customer to have to have 2 machines to deal with (accomplished). The second vision they had was they wanted SolidWorks to become a strong company (accomplished). And the third vision they initially had was that they wanted to treat their customers right (accomplished). By accomplishing these 3 visions they have had 16 major releases and over 700,000 users worldwide. Going forward Jon stated that they want to remain focused on the fundamentals which includes but is not limited to reliability, speed, ease of use, data exchange, drafting and Geometric Modeling. This was a very interesting session and it seems like they are heading in the right direction.

The final session I attended today was given by the R&D panel at SolidWorks which was hosted by Cholly Nachman. The panel consisted of Austin O’Malley (Chief Tech Officer), Paul Chastell (Director of SolidWorks Development), Brian Harrison (Heads of SolidWorks Labs), Scott Harris (VP of New Product Development) and finally Jim Wilkinson (Director of User Experience). This was a very informative session with a lot of insight on the behind the scenes stuff that happens and is happening at SolidWorks.

Well off I go to the the Partner Pavillion to attend the official Welcome Reception.

Stay tuned for more coverage of SolidWorks World 2008, including interviews with Greg Jankowski, Jon Hirschtick and Jeff Ray.

San Diego, Here I Come has officially become San Diego, Here I Am! We arrived yesterday shortly after 2:00 PM in sunny So Cal. What a difference this weather was than what was going on back home (7 degrees, snowing with white out conditions). But hey, at least I won’t have to deal with that for a week. After getting myself checked in at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina and getting semi settled in, off we went again for a tour of the city, what a beautiful place. Saturday night was a chance to mingle and meet the SolidWorks “Blog Squad” over great food and drinks at the Hard Rock Cafe San Diego. This was an awesome chance to finally put some faces to names that I have talked to online over the past year. You can see some of the pictures on the other blogger’s sites. What a great time and I am looking forward to today’s activities which will include a bunch of press breakout sessions and I am going to try to sit in on the CAD Managers Boot Camp for a little while that will be going on this afternoon. I will hopefully post tonight to let you know about the days activities.