Monthly Archives: October 2008

Oct 31 2008

UPDATE: SolidWorks 2009 SP1.0 EV Is Live…For Some Of Us!

Yesterday I posted that SolidWorks 2009 SP1.0 EV was live but some users were unable to access it or even see it on their Downloads and Updates page. I got an update today through a comment from Steve R. (THANK YOU VERY MUCH!) about how to fix it. Below is his comment:

“I had the same problem, so I contacted Customer Support. What I had to do was basically re-register for the EV program, which is more than just selecting the “Notify me for EV access.” They referred me to Knowledge Base solutions S-028528 and S-028529. Once I did that, the EV downloads were visible.”

So here is what you have to do. Follow this link to access the Early Visibility program page. From there you will want to click the “Click here to sign up for access to this program” link and you will be taken to a page that allows you to sign up for it. Once you have filled out your information and click the register button you will have access to the Early Visibility downloads through the Downloads and Updates page in the SolidWorks Customer Portal.

I am not sure what happened here because I have always been signed up before but it seems as if some of the EV accounts got deleted at some point, possibly during the redesign of the SolidWorks website.

Hope this works for everyone!

Oct 30 2008

SolidWorks 2009 SP1.0 EV Is Live…For Some Of Us!

Above is the email that I received yesterday informing me that SolidWorks 2009 SP1.0 EV went live which you can download in the Downloads and Updates page inside of the SolidWorks Customer Portal. However, there is 1 small problem! When I went to the Download page I could find no sign of SolidWorks 2009 SP1.0 EV. At first I figured that it just wasn’t posted yet (sometimes the press releases are out before the downloads) but when I asked Mike Puckett and Lou Gallo on Twitter whether it was there or not and they both said that it was. Brian McElyea also said that he could NOT find it anywhere on the Download page. Worse yet, I don’t have the “Sign up for EV’ link either that it talks about in the email above in the 2nd paragraph. I tried it again this morning on my work machine and it was nowhere to be found there either. I have cleaned all of my cookies, cache and browsing history and still no luck.

So this morning I sent an email to SolidWorks informing them of what I was running into. Hopefully someone can figure out what is going on and I will post an update on here for everyone else that is encountering this same problem.

If you would like to receive an email informing you of Early Visibility go to the “My Profile” link in the Customer Portal and then check the box next to “Notify me for EV (Early Visibility) access”. See screen shots below.

Oct 29 2008

Meeting of the SWUG’s in Michigan

Next week Friday (November 7, 2008) there will be a first for the SolidWorks community in the state of Michigan. A joint meeting is going to be held between the West Michigan SolidWorks Group and the Eastern Michigan SolidWorks User Group on the campus of Michigan State University at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL).

Dan Bovinich, leader of the EMSWUG, has done an unbelievable job of setting this meeting up and was gracious enough to invite the users of the WMSWUG to join him and his group in East Lansing, Michigan. I am really looking forward to this meeting and the opportunity to network with SolidWorks users from the east side of the state. If you are going to be within driving distance of the Michigan State campus on November 7 I highly suggest you think about attending. The meeting is going to consist of a “What’s New in SolidWorks 2009″ presentation and then a tour of the laboratory. Below you will find a complete agenda for the upcoming meeting.

Now you are probably asking yourself, what is the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory? I cannot give you a good answer to this question; I am hoping that after next week Friday I will be able to tell you in depth what it is all about. All I can do now is tell you to visit their website and take a look for yourself. I do know however that they use SolidWorks for their design work and have been extremely generous enough to invite us all out for a big meeting and tour. I will be sure to post about this meeting next weekend after I get home and let you know all about it in case you can’t attend the event yourself.

Schedule for November 7, 2008

  • 12:30 – 1:30 Doors Open, Luncheon Starts
  • 1:30 – 3:30 “What’s New in SolidWorks 2009″ Presentation by Darin Grosser, DASI Solutions
  • 3:30 – 4:30 Break, Networking
  • 4:00 – 4:15 SolidWorks Giveaways
  • 4:15 – 5:45 A Professional Tour Through The Cyclotron

Click here to RSVP for the joint SWUG meeting.

Click here for a map to the NSCL.

Click here for a parking map.

If you would like to attend and would also like to take your kid/kids you will need to fill out the permission form included in this informational package (includes tour guide, campus map and permission form).

If you have any additional questions please feel free to contact me and I will try to help you out in any way that I can. Hope to see you there!

Oct 29 2008

SolidWorks 2009 Task Pane…Do You Use It?

How many of you use the SolidWorks Task Pane? No, I mean really use it. For the first couple of years that I used SolidWorks I didn’t even have it turned on. We didn’t use the Design Library at that time and I never really explored the other features that it had to offer. Since then I have used it almost exclusively in my daily design processes. It is such a hidden tool that I don’t think gets utilized as much as it should. We have 1 guy in our engineering department that NEVER uses it, he doesn’t need to use the Design Library that we have set up and thus he hasn’t looked into many of the other functionality. In this article I want to break down what all of the tabs have to offer and what you can do with each of them. You may have more or less tabs on your Task Pane depending on your SolidWorks product but this will cover the basic Task Pane. The picture above shows the location of the unmovable Task Pane in its standard collapsed state.

Tab #1 – SolidWorks Resources

This tab has all kinds of valuable resources to offer. The first group titled “Getting Started” offers 5 main options. The top 2 are standard SolidWorks buttons; New Document and Open a Document. Both of these can also be found in your ‘File’ pull down menu but if you always start with the Task Pane open like above it is right there for you. Quick, easy access to the 2 commands that you execute 97% of the time you open SolidWorks. The next option is Tutorials which is a link to the 39 tutorials that SolidWorks packaged in your install. These are a great resource for some of those design processes that you don’t do everyday but you run into from time to time. The next option is What’s New. This is a link to the PDF file that is available as each new major release. The first time that you fire up the updated major release (i.e. SolidWorks 2009) you should immediately take some time and browse around the PDF document. It shows you and offers some hands on training off the new features that are included in that release. The last button in the group is General Information which is a link to this web page which is the Technical Support page of SolidWorks.

The next group is titled “Community” and it offers you 4 quick access links to SolidWorks websites. Here are the links:

  • Customer Portal – This is the main web page for any SolidWorks user. This is almost anything and everything that you will need in regards to SolidWorks.
  • Discussion Forum – This is a great place to help other users out or post a problem that you may be running into and wait for the quick responses that will be coming in to help you out.
  • User Groups – These meetings are great for SolidWorks users to network with each other face to face and hear GREAT presentations from some of the leading SolidWorks presenters.
  • Latest News – This is a link to ALL of the SolidWorks Corporation RSS Feeds. Check some of them out to stay up to date with what is going on at SolidWorks.

The 3rd grouping in this pane is called “Online Resources”. This offers some great, quick resources for you to use during the middle of your designs. The first option is a search box to find custom manufacturers. What it does is search the SupplierSource website for whatever entry you put in the search box. This is great to use for the times when you have a part that you know your company can’t manufacture and need to outsource it. The next option is a link to the SolidWorks Partner Solutions website so that you can browse for that perfect add on to your SolidWorks package. The last option in the group is a link to the SolidWorks Labs webpage so that you can keep tabs on what SolidWorks is working on for future add ons and programs.

And finally on the bottom of the SolidWorks Resources tab you will see the Tip of the Day box that is chocked full of tips that you can cycle through. All in all this tab has more useful links than you can shake a stick at. Check it out sometime and you will be amazed at how useful it can become in your daily design processes.

Tab #2 – Design Library

The 2nd tab from the top is the “Design Library”. It offers you some important and key trees that you can expand. The 1st tree is the SW Library Features which is the Design Library that you have created for your company or the default one that is given to you with the software. The next tree that is in the list is the Toolbox (which you can see I don’t have activated in my screen shot above). The Toolbox is often used for your standard nuts and bolts and fasteners in general which we don’t include in our assemblies very often. The next tab in the list is the 3D ContentCentral tab which gives you quick and easy access to the supplier and user submitted models. To browse around 3D ContentCentral without having SolidWorks activated you can follow this link. The 4th and final tree in this list is the SolidWorks Content tab expandable list which provides links to folders that include Blocks, CircuitWorks, Routing and Weldments. I can honestly say that I have never used this list because it doesn’t pertain to our industry but I can definitely see where it would be extremely useful to have this at your fingertips when designing products that use some of these features.

Another key feature of this tab is the toolbar on top of these expandable trees. The first button lets you quickly add an open part to the Design Library. The second button lets you add an entire folder to this tab which is a very nice option (see below). The 3rd button lets you create the SW Library Features tree and the 4th button lets you refresh all of these folders.

DESIGN LIBRARY TIP – A trick that I learned at a presentation given by Matthew Cummins was to add the project folder that you are working in to the Design Library tab. This allows you to quickly drag and drop components from that project into your project assembly as you are working on it.

Tab #3 – File Explorer / SolidWorks PDM

This tab is your main tab for file management. Whether you are using either of the SolidWorks PDM programs or not this is your tab to manage your SolidWorks files. There are 3 expandable trees in which ever file management system you are using. The first is Recent Documents which lists the last 9 (at least in my version) documents that you had open. This is nice because I have it quite often that I am switching back and forth between models all day long and I always seem to just close the one that I need to reference next. This is a very handy feature. The next tree is Open in SolidWorks which lists all the the SolidWorks files that you have open. If you don’t like the way that Ctrl+Tab works or you don’t like to always have to go into your pull downs you can access all of your open SolidWorks files right here. The next tree is the Desktop. This acts as a quick way to get to your desktop and whatever files you may have laying around on your machine or in a network location. By using this tree to open files instead of the Open command you can drag components into your assembly straight from this tab. If you are running one of the SolidWorks PDM packages (Workgroup or Enterprise) you will also have access to the Vault from this tab.

FILE EXPLORER TIP – We currently do not use any sort of a PDM software so I like to make sure that I have a shortcut on my desktop to the folder where ALL of our CAD files are located. This way when I expand my Desktop tree I have quick access to all of my CAD files without having to cycle through all of the network locations.

Tab #4 – Search

This tab serves 1 purpose. When you search for a file in the search bar at the top of your SolidWorks window your results are shown in this tab. Quite simple and straight forward!

Tab #5 – View Palette

This tab is only available when you are creating or have created a SolidWorks Drawing file. From this tab you are able to quickly drag views into your drawing from this View Palette. You also have the options at the top of this tab to Import Annotations and Auto-start projected view. We don’t have Drawing templated set up with predefined views because they vary so much from drawing to drawing at our company so I use this tab exclusively when I create drawings. This was one of my favorite new features that came out in SolidWorks 2008.

Tab #6 – Appearances / Scenes


This tab is a new addition in SolidWorks 2009 that enables you to easily add appearances and scenes to your models. Everything in regards to these items has been consolidated into one location which is this tab. Very handy when working with PhotoWorks renderings.

Tab #7 – Custom Properties

This tab is also a new feature in SolidWorks 2009 which is a spot where you can build a custom custom properties form so that you can easily add custom properties to your SolidWorks Parts and Assemblies. As you can see I have not had the time to set this up “officially” yet but I have had the chance to experiment with it and it is AWESOME! I am really looking forward to implementing this at the company that I work at. Of any of the new features in SolidWorks 2009, besides the performance gains, I have heard the most praise for this new tool. Make sure you at least try it out and see what it can offer for your company.

CONCLUSION

The SolidWorks Task Pane is a great tool if it is utilized correctly. If you don’t already use it give it a shot. Try to use it for a couple of weeks and see what you think. You will never know just how much it can benefit you until you use it.

Feel free to drop me a comment if you would like to add anything to this post or if you have a question about the SolidWorks Task Pane.

Oct 24 2008

Kind Of Quiet Here

It has been kind of quiet at RockSolid Perspective this past week and I wanted to let you know what has been going on.

The economic downturn has finally run its course on the company that I work at in West Michigan. All of our orders are down and we have been waiting to reach the bottom of the “economic hole” before we can start climbing our way out of it. Because of this slowdown in orders everyone got cut back to 36 hours 2 weeks ago. Then last week Thursday everyone was informed that there were going to be pay cuts handed down to the entire company. Reality really set in at this point.

It began to take its toll last week when our Vice President of Sales, who we hired 6 weeks ago, decided that the move to our company was not what was best for him at this time in his life and he decided to go back to the company that he came to us from. Because of this, last week Thursday I was offered a Sales Engineer position which would take me out of engineering for the most part and put me on the road more often. It was kind of flattering for me to think that the President & Vice President thought I would excel at this position but I struggled with whether it was the route I wanted to go with my career. After REALLY struggling with it over the weekend, then going on the road meeting with some new potential customer on Monday, I came to the decision on Tuesday to turn down the opportunity and stay in the Engineering department. However, I will be more involved in the quoting processes from now on but as an Engineer and not as Sales. Let me tell you, this was not an easy decision and it caused a few sleepless nights on my behalf.

Then everything broke loose on Wednesday. Management decided that the hour and pay cuts were not the best route to go for our company because it posed too big of a risk for losing some of the employees that we couldn’t afford to lose. So Wednesday turned into D-Day at our company as 10 employees were permanently laid off which cut our 1st shirt workforce by 25%. Thankfully I was not affected directly by this but it is always hard to see people let go like this, people that I have worked with everyday for 9 years.

As for RockSolid Perspective, I am hoping that next week things will begin to get back to normal and you will be seeing the normal posting on here. I am planning on doing some posts about tools and methods that we use to quote parts and also some tools that I am hoping to implement into our standard quoting process. Look for these to be coming in the next couple of weeks.

As for you, I hope all is going well in your occupational life. It is a rough time for our country right now and I am hoping that the end will be coming sooner rather than later.

Oct 21 2008

Free SimulationXpress Online Training

As a CAD Administrator I understand and appreciate the value of an employee that has been thoroughly trained, however the funds are not always there for a company to send every new employee to training at their reseller. I believe this is an all too common occurrence and you end up fighting the resulting problems for the first months of each new designers employment. Or you have the situation where there is a feature that you don’t use very often but you realize what the benefits could be if you knew how to run it effectively.

In order to hopefully offset some of these occurrences with probably 1 of the lesser used tools as a whole, SolidWorks is offering free training for SolidWorks SimulationXpress which is included in every SolidWorks package. The training does not require any sort of registration so you won’t have to worry about a bunch of promotional or sales emails and calls following your training. This is a great opportunity to get some free training and expand your knowledge of the entire SolidWorks package. This is also a great link to pass on to the rest of the designers at your company so that hopefully you can all be on the same page during the analysis of your designs. Also, in addition to the free training video you will be able to download some models for your own personal testing after you watch the video. What more could you ask for?

I have not had the opportunity to sit through the whole training session yet but I am hoping to at some point today. Check it out for yourself and see if this is a feature of SolidWorks that could benefit your company.

To access the free training follow this link or click on the image above and enjoy.

Oct 20 2008

Help Shape The Future Of PDM

SolidWorks is looking for your help and input. I have recently done a couple of posts on Workgroup PDM and it seemed to be a hot topic each time I did so. So here is your chance, SolidWorks is looking for your input on their PDM products so that can produce the best products that they can. So here is the deal, you fill out a short survey and they will contact you about doing a 60 minute product review/demonstration on November 6 or 7. These can be done in person in Concord, MA or from the comfort of your desk through a webinar. In return for helping them out you will receive a $100 Amazon gift card.

To participate, fill out the survey found here and wait for a return phone call or email about the PDM test drive. Here is your chance to let SolidWorks know what you think about Workgroup or Enterprise PDM and what you would like to see in the future.

Oct 16 2008

Court Is In Session!

A while ago I posted on the suit that Autodesk filed against SolidWorks about the rights to use the DWG name. It seemed to get a lot of attention in the CAD industry so I thought I would share this link with you. Ralph Grabowski, author of the WorldCAD Access blog pointed me to the new and improved site of Owen Wengerd. The site is called CAD/Court and it follows the CAD litigation in general. Check it out here.

My personal note: Isn’t it kind of sad that there are enough litigations in the CAD industry that warrant a site to follow them all. Oh well, I guess that is the day we are in and it is all part of business these days.

Oct 16 2008

Orlando or Bust…Build Your Network!

NETWORKING? This seems to be the big topic in this day and age. It seems like everyone is trying to build their own personal network with various types of acquaintances that they have. In the next part of the series of posts I am doing on how to convince your management to send you to SolidWorks WORLD 2009 in Orlando, Florida I will be touching on all of the various networking opportunities that you will have and that will present themselves for your company. Today there all kinds of social networking sites out there, sites like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. etc. etc. These are all great sites and I personally participate in a lot of them but in the end, no social networking site is as good as face to face networking in my opinion. A lot of times the social networking that you do on a daily basis lead to great face to face networking possibilities. One of the things I like the best about User Group meetings is the opportunity to network in person with other users in my area. SolidWorks WORLD offers all kinds of great face to face networking opportunities and they usually present themselves, all you have to do is be there. Below I have broken these opportunities down into the biggest 4 groups that I could think of. There are many more than what are just listed here but these I believe are the best ones, for me at least.

SolidWorks Users In Your Industry

SolidWorks does a great job of supplying you the opportunity to network at this conference. Every day they offer what they call “Birds of a Feather” lunches where they break up tables into different industries so that you can (if you want) sit at a table with other SolidWorks users in your industry. This is a great chance to talk to others about how they are designing their products. Are they designing everything in context, top down or bottom up assembly modeling. There are so many different ways to do things in SolidWorks that it is good to talk to others in your field and bounce your methods off of them, talk about their methods and find out why they do it that way. It may result in you coming back after the conference and start designing things a new way that will increase your proficiency and decrease your turn around times to get things out the door.

SolidWorks User In Your Region

Another part of the “Birds of a Feather” lunches are the opportunity to sit down with other users in your region. It is always a benefit to make contacts with other SolidWorks users that are close to your hometown. There always seems to be a closer relationship when you are in the same area as another user as opposed to communicating with someone from the other side of the country or a whole different country all together. Not saying that those contacts are not important also but the ability to have people closer around you that you can possibly meet up with after SolidWorks WORLD is very important. When I ran AutoCAD for the 1st five or six years in my line of work I had no other AutoCAD users that I could contact with issues or ideas. That is one of the biggest things that attracted me to SolidWorks was the community of users that seems so vibrant with this software.

As for the “Birds of a Feather” lunches I strongly suggest you participate in these. They are great opportunities to meet users and get your name out there.

SolidWorks Employees

The biggest thing that I noticed at my first SolidWorks WORLD last year was the availability of SolidWorks employees to everyone. It seemed as if everywhere I went there were SolidWorks employees talking to the casual users. This included Jeff Ray, Jon Hirschtick, Scott Harris and others who have MAJOR roles in the SolidWorks product and the future of SolidWorks. How many times have you sat at your computer and said WHY does the software act this way? Why can’t it do this or that? I have had this discussion inside my head many times and this is your chance to ask those questions to the people at the source of the answers. All you need to do is introduce yourself as you walk by and the door is open for discussion. How much better could you have it. Let them know what you think of the software and where you would like to see it go. The users are what drive this software so make your voice heard and let them know what you think. This is what they are there for.

SolidWorks Power Users

The SolidWorks community has some very well known faces in it that most people recognize. People like Phil Sluder, Ed Eaton, all of the SolidWorks Blog Squad, Gerald Davis, Wayne Tiffany and others that are walking around the conference just like you. There is nothing more that these users like (speaking for myself but I am pretty confident that the others feel the same way) than to talk to other users. In the end, every is a user of the software and everyone can learn something from others. The user that has been using the software since the 1st release can learn something from the user that has only used it for a month and vice versa. Be sure to introduce yourself to these people and talk to them, there is a wealth of knowledge out there that is just waiting to be explored.

In conclusion, SolidWorks WORLD is a great place to network face to face with all sorts of users. If you are there and see me wandering around aimlessly make sure you introduce yourself. I would love talking to you to see what I can learn from all of you.