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.