Day 5, or Day 4 of the actual conference.  With this day comes a lot of ups and downs.  Downs because this is the end of it for another year.  Ups because of the information that is given to all of the attendees at the General Session on Monday.  This session is probably the single most anticipated SolidWorks related meeting/event of the year.  The time when they announce the top 10 enhancement list, give a what’s new in next year’s version demo, AND announce where next year’s SolidWorks WORLD is going to be held and when.  On top of all this there is usually some surprise guest that runs out on stage to greet and inspire the audience.

This year did not disappoint either.  Fielder Hiss once again started the session off by greeting and trying to wake everybody after an awesome event at Disney’s Animal Kingdom off site event on Tuesday night.  To start the morning off Fielder invited Don Richardson from Microsoft, a sponsor of the event, on stage.  Don gave a brief speech and headed off stage.  Here is where the fun really began (no offense Don if you are reading this).  Time for the surprise guests of the event and they WERE a riot from the time they came running for the back of the ballroom to the time that they walked off back stage.  Mike & Joe from the new Discovery Channel TV show Prototype This.  These guys were AWESOME!  If you haven’t ever seen the show it is 4 guys (or is there 5???) that design, build, and test a project in around a 5 week timeline.  They use SolidWorks 3D CAD and SolidWorks Simulation throughout their timeframe.  Here are some pictures from their time on stage.

These guys were a riot the entire time and definitely awesome surprise guests for all of the attendees at SolidWorks WORLD 2009.  Next up was time for the SolidWorks Top 10 Enhancements announcements.  This year they were given by 10 SolidWorks User Group Leaders.  Also this year was the first time that they have used the new tool SolidWorks Brainstorm (hopefully this gets transferred over to the enhancement request site).  The top 10 for SolidWorks WORLD 2009 were:

1. Increase Program Stability
2. Clear Memory When File is Closed
3. Backwards Compatibility
4. Rename Configurations that are Referenced in an Open Assembly
5. Faster Rebuilds on Complex Models
6. On the Fly Equation Creation & Editing
7. Dual Monitor Support
8. Add Lock Points for Model Rebuilds
9. Esc key equals Abort to Get Out of Commands
10. Excel Behavior in Design Tables

Seeing how some of the SWUGN representatives were on stage already it was time to announce the SWUGN User Group of the Year, the SWUGN User Group Leader of the Year, and the SWUGN Lifetime Achievement Award.  And the winners are:

SWUGN User Group of the Year

SWUGN User Group Leader of the Year

SWUGN Lifetime Achievement Awards

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After these awards were announced the tallest man in CAD/CAM came out on stage, Mark Schneider.  His first line of business was to announce the winners of the Model Mania competition.  This is a competition that measures your CAD skills against other users.  The fastest user to model the given part, and get it right, is crowned the winner for the year and is given some great graphics cards as prizes.  This year the winners, on both the VAR and customer sides were:

Mark, along with Ian Hogg, Jeremy Regnerus, and Neil Cooke then rolled out the What’s New in SolidWorks 2010 demonstration.  This year they were also joined on stage by some customers who helped them roll this demonstration out.  The new features that were demonstrated for SolidWorks 2010 were:

1. New View Mates Tool
2. Update to Mirror Components (now has its own interface, no mates will be needed)
3. New Design Study Tool for SolidWorks Simulation
4. Multi Body Sheet Metal Parts (includes a quick preview)
5. Multi Body Weldments
6. Updates to the DXF Out Tool
7. Updates to the Reference Plane Creation Tool
   1. now able to add planes between faces and diameters
   2. able to add plane tangent to diameter at an angle to a specified plane
8. New Assembly Visualization Tool
   1. now able to output a purchased component list to excel directly from an assembly
9. New Property Manager Builder
10. Ability to Add Datums and GD&T Callouts Right on Dimension Extension Lines
11. Ability to Drag & Drop Notes On Top Of Each Other, Automatically Added to the End of a Number List
12. Ability to Resize Balloons & Add the Quantity Next to Them
13. BOM’s Now Act More Like Excel
14. New Heads Up Dimension Display
    1. with styles
15. New Dimension Tool Updates
16. Center Marks Are Now Able to be Auto Trimmed
17. Instant 3D Now Available on Imported Models
18. Updates to SolidWorks Enterprise PDM
    1. replicate
    2. convert
    3. print or plot
19. New Environment Friendly Tool
    1. named “Sage”
    2. SolidWorks working in conjunction with PE International

When all of the What’s New in SolidWorks 2010 presentation was done Jeff Ray jumped up on stage for a final address to the crowd before the conclusion of SolidWorks WORLD 2009.  His 1st order of business was to announce that SolidWorks WORLD 2010 would be held in Anaheim, California from January 31, 2010 to February 3, 2010.  Another thing that needs to be addressed that he mentioned was a new program that SolidWorks was proud to announce in conjunction with all of the VAR’s.  It is a new program called the Engineers Stimulus Package.  What is it you are asking?  It is a new program that will allow all engineers / designers (that used SolidWorks) that have been laid off or let go from the job to get FREE CSWP or CSWA training and also some sort of license to put on their home computers so that they can stay up to date with the software and hopefully get a new job using SolidWorks.

So that wraps up my main coverage of SolidWorks WORLD 2009 in sunny and warm Orlando, Florida.  I am planning on doing some additional posts of the “What’s New in SolidWorks 2010” features and the Top 10 List but it may be a little while.  Thank you so much for staying tuned in and following RockSolid Perspective during this event.  THANKS AGAIN!

Well, that’s it!  It’s all over!  The fat lady has sung on another SolidWorks WORLD and the majority of the attendees have returned home again.  As a quick side note this is the 2nd time I have typed this post up.  The first time my blog writer crashed just as I was saving it and I lost everything so I apologize for the time that it took me to get something up here.

As I stated previously I am going to hold off a little bit on Wednesday’s General Session so that I can process all of the information that is given to us there.  Wednesday, more so than the rest of the days is absolute information overload.  This is the day that they name the SWUGN User Group of the Year, the SWUGN User Group Leader of the Year, the SWUGN Lifetime Achievement award, the top 10 enhancement list, and the What’s Going to be New in 2010.  That is a lot of information to process in a 1 1/2 hour time frame.

So on we go to the rest of the day.  After the General Session dismissed I headed over to the 1st technical training session of the day.  I decided to sit in on a session titled “In Context Sketch Editing for Robust Top Down Assemblies”.  It was a good session but was more geared towards the beginner SolidWorks user.  I still however did pick up some little things that I definitely want to try when I get back home.  Next, off I went to a session called “Optimizing Your Hardware for SolidWorks”.  This session was given by a gentleman from ATI and covered a wide variety of things in regards to your computer system.  I am usually not a huge fan of sitting in on sessions given by exhibitors but I thought that I would give it a shot.  This guy did an all right job of it but you could definitely hear some plugs from time to time.

Next up was time for some food and fellowship.  Another great lunch period except for the fact that I ended up launching spaghetti sauce like a cannon all over my brand new WHITE SolidWorks User Group Leader t-shirt.  Unfortunate but hopefully we can get it out.  After lunch and a brief time in the press room I was off to my 2nd to last session of the conference.  I decided to sit in on a session called “SolidWorks Network Installation, Where to Put Things and Why”.  This was a good session about putting all of the files that are listed in the Tools > Options > File Locations drop down on a network drive somewhere so that EVERYONE is always working off of the same group of files.  Looked like a great idea and one that I am going to experiment with when I get some time back at work.

Next up, and the grand finale of the technical training sessions at SolidWorks WORLD 2009 was a session that I went to called “Effective Use of the Hole Wizard”.  This session seemed to cover a lot of things in a short amount of time.  It went from a beginners session, to an intermediate session, to an advanced session all within an hour.  The advanced portion was quite involved and covered some things that are not endorsed by SolidWorks but could be very beneficial if done right, and I will repeat that, IF DONE RIGHT.

After that session wrapped up it was time for the hardest portion of the whole event, saying good bye.  It is never fun to say goodbye to someone that you have met and spent so much time with in a 5 day period.  At an event like this you seem to get a group of users, SolidWorks employees, resellers, exhibitors, etc. that you spend almost every non waking, conference moment with.  These are the ones that it is difficult to say goodbye to, you might not see these people for another year (or even worse, ever).  It is definitely a good thing for such social media applications such as Facebook & Twitter and other tools like phone, email, and IM.  So to all of you that are reading this and I got to spend some incredible time with last week, I want to say THANKS and I hope that we can connect well before we all touch down in Anaheim, California next January 31.

So Tuesday is over and there is only 1 day left at SolidWorks WORLD 2009. Tuesday did not disappoint however as far as information goes. As everyday offers there were a ton of technical sessions available in about every area. After the morning General Session I headed over to the Swan hotel for Phil Sluder’s Tips & Tricks Session. This thing was packed out; they were turning people away because the room could not fit anymore. All of Phil’s sessions are always really popular so the amount of people that wanted to check this one out did not really surprise me.

Next I was off to lunch. I met up with some users from West Michigan and had a great lunch with them before we all headed out separate ways to the afternoon training sessions. Next on the agenda for me was a presentation called “Reuse not Redraw, 8 Ways to Use Your Legacy Data” given by Michael Hess. This session dealt with how to use imported data inside of SolidWorks and some different options for how to modify it if need be.

There was not a session the REALLY caught my eye during the 2:45 time slot so I headed over to the Partner Pavilion so that I could check out some of the great products that were available. One product that really caught my eye that I saw last year already was a product called Xpresso. I am really looking forward to doing a trial of this product that I will be sure to post right on here. I also talked to the people at Logopress3 which is a SolidWorks add on product that helps with metal stamping and the die design industry. I am planning on doing a web demo with them and then run a trial of this product so that I can write you a review of the product here.

For the last session of the day I attended Matt Lombard’s session titled “Skeletons in the Closet, Layout/Horizontal/Wide Tree Modeling. This was a session that Matt has never done before and he seemed surprised at the number of attendees that were there. The session dealt with using layout sketches to drive the rest of the features in the part with the overall goal being to have the ability to move and reorder all features in the SolidWorks FeatureManager without anything breaking (other than fillets). It was a very interesting session and it gave me some ideas of things to try in my own modeling environment which is in context.

Then the real fun began. The annual off site event was held this year at the Animal Kingdom. It was a great night full of food, drinks, fellowship and amusement rides. It was a great opportunity for me to catch up with some friends and meet new users from the community. I had the absolute pleasure of catching up with Matthew Cummins and meeting Casey Gorman for the first time. All in all it was a great event and the SolidWorks Event team did a tremendous job of organizing it. I was disappointed to realize that I had forgotten my camera so I apologize for not having any pictures on here of the event but I am sure you will be able to find some on the Flickr group for SolidWorks WORLD 2009.

SIDE NOTE: The Wednesday morning General Session is always jam packed with information and I want to be sure to give that post due time so I may not be posting that for a little while. Please hang in there and I will have something on here but it may be out of order for the rest of the posts of I have been doing. Thanks for understanding and I look forward to bringing you continued coverage of SolidWorks WORLD 2009.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: SolidWorks WORLD 2010 will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California from January 31. 2010 – February 3, 2010. Start planning your trip today!

After the General Session that Monday offered it was hard to imagine how it could be outdone by the rest of the week. I am not saying that Tuesday’s General Session out did it but it definitely lived up to expectations.

Fielder Hiss opened up the Tuesday session and it was quickly known that today was going to be a great session again. First on the agenda was a quick speech by Tom Salomone from Hewlett Packard. HP is one of the primary sponsors of SolidWorks WORLD 2009, and I am sure that everyone will 2^nd me in saying thank you to ALL of the sponsors of this event. After Tom left the stage Jeremy Luchini, head of the Certification department at SolidWorks took the stage. Jeremy and his group do an AWESOME job and they deserve a lot of credit for the roughly 500 CSWP’s that showed up to the event on Monday night. Jeremy was joined on stage with Yanick Tremblay from Megabrands who gave everyone an idea of some of the obstacles that they encounter with getting their employees CSWP certified.

After Jeremy & Yanick exited the stage it was time for the main speaker of the day…Jon Hirschtick. Jon, for those of you that don’t already know, is the founder of SolidWorks and former CEO. Jon is an absolute wealth of knowledge in the world on CAD and he loves to share it with everyone he talks to. Jon is currently a Group Executive at SolidWorks and has an office right across the hallway from Jeff Ray, the current CEO. He began his speech by talking about some technology trends that he sees and is really interested in. They were:

• Touch / Motion UI
  • We were given a preview of a product that has SolidWorks on a touch screen, very cool
• Online Applications
  • Such as SolidWorks Labs products Drawings Now & Blueprints Now
• Video Game Technology
  • Ambient Inclusion
• 3D Printing

Jon then was joined on stage by a couple of customers that he visited this year. The 1^st was Matt Dunbar from New Balance Shoes. This product was amazing and really gave the attendees a new outlook on what goes into the design of shoes as far as CAD goes. The method of a normal design is done by first creating some sketches on paper, then scanning those sketches into SolidWorks, then they use those sketches to begin modeling their shoes, and finally it gets sent off to the 3D printer that they have. They also do a great deal of rapid prototyping using an Objet prototyping machine. A design that used to take 15 days in 2D is now done in 5 days using 3D. The fact that almost knocked me off of my chair was that some of their part models contain up to 1,800 features, amazing.

Jon was the joined on stage by Tom Waldner from Sony Ericsson. The one great thing I got out of his presentation was that they only design for 2-3 hours before they send their design to a 3D printer. This prevents them from designing too long when something is right or isn’t going to work.

Here is where the real fun began. SolidWorks Simulation was put on display and I do not even know how to explain the rest so I will let the pictures do the talking.

Yes that is Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, riding onto the stage on a pink scooter in front of a sumo wrestler.

Like I said, works can’t explain what I witnessed this morning. ENOUGH SAID!

Stay tuned for more to come from SolidWorks WORLD 2009!

Monday posed a very different kind of day at SolidWorks WORLD for me. I attended the General Session right off the bat in the morning to get my batteries charged. The rest of the day kind of turned into a blur for me up until around 3:45 pm or 4:00 pm. I did my first ever SolidWorks WORLD presentation in the 2:45-3:45 time slot so up until the point I was busy tying up loose ends on my presentation.

After that I had a GREAT rest of the day. I attended the SWUGN Summit at 4:30 pm that was unbelievable. Richard Doyle did a great job of running through what has happened in the past year in the SolidWorks User Group Network. Some awards were handed out during this session for the SWUGN Partner of the Year and the SWUGN Reseller of the Year. And they were:

• SWUGN Part of the Year
  • Rapid Sheet Metal (represented by Jay Jacobs)
• SWUGN Reseller of the Year
  • Alignex (Minnesota)
  • My reseller, DASI Solutions, was one of the top 5.

This ended the day for me in sessions and now it was on to the fun times of the day. Next up on the agenda was the Press Dinner that was held at the Epcot Center, The Great Wall of China. There was great food and fellowship outside before the dinner started. Running a tight schedule, the bloggers cut out of the dinner early and headed on over to the CSWP event that was held across the road of the Swan hotel and a place called Fantasia Gardens. All of the attendees received an awesome gift of a Neo Shifter from Mega Brands and then again had great food and fellowship (notice a trend starting here). A lot of the attendees also had the opportunity to form teams and create an iCoaster in a competition against each other. It was a ton of fun.

That wrapped up the day on Monday for me. Stay tuned for updates of Tuesday right here at RockSolid Perspective.

To begin I want to apologize for how long it has taken me to get this on here. I thought that this year, seeing that I was not doing any one on one interviews, would allow me to have more time to post here but that has not been the case so far. It seems as though I am busier this year than last but hey, that is OK with me.

At the beginning of every morning at SolidWorks WORLD, around 8:30 am the General Session takes place. SolidWorks kicked off this event yesterday with a bang by having an all around great opening General Session. Jeff Ray opened the session with a greeting and a state of the company address. SolidWorks was hoping for an attendance of 3,000-3,500, because of the economic conditions, and was blown away with an attendance of 4,313 as of Monday morning. All I can say is WOW! Jeff then went into throwing some numbers out to the audience by stating that the customer satisfaction is currently at 91% with 43% being very satisfied. However, SolidWorks wants to focus on the 9 people out of a 100 that are not satisfied so that they can inch closer to the top of the mountain. He then went into grading some various aspects of the company, giving Customer Service a B-, Performance a C+, and User Experience a B. Jeff then talked about some of the lessons that were learned during the great depression with the products that followed such as nylon, the car radio, and…SPAM. From that some of the great products that are being produced today such as companies like Microwind Technologies, Regenerative Technologies, Trojan UV Technologies, and Design That Matters. There is definitely some great products out there right now.

Next up was the star of the show in many people’s eyes. Sir Richard Branson joined Jeff on stage and was an absolute riot. If you do not know who Sir Richard is, he is the man behind the Virgin name brand. He definitely did NOT disappoint when he was on stage. Instead of writing out what Sir Richard talked about I am going to do a bullet list of some of the notable things he talked about.

• He jumped off stage at the age of 17 to protest a war.
• He joked that he is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the amount of times he has been pulled out of the sea.
• His nickname at the office is “Dr. Yes”.
• His first business experiences were destroyed by rats and rabbits eating them
• Virgin Airlines
  • Began by asking for secondary Boeing 747′s.
  • Boeing asked if the airline would go the whole way with a name like Virgin.
• He said that talking to the consumers is what makes a good design.
• You have to have humor in everything that you do.

All in all Sir Richard was an awesome guest on stage and the best one that I have ever seen at SolidWorks WORLD. There was a ton of buzz around the convention center the whole day on Monday because of him. That wrapped up the general session on Monday at SolidWorks WORLD 2009 and if that was any indication of what the rest of the week is going to be like it is going to be great.