One of the biggest responsibilities of being a SolidWorks administrator is to make sure that all of your users are using the same templates, right?  Well how do you handle that?  The generic answer would be to put all of your templates in a network folder and remap all of the SolidWorks file locations to that network location.  This is great but you will notice some lag when referencing files over a network like this.  So the best bet is to put the templates on the hard drive of each users computer but then how do you keep them updated.

Well I think I may have solved this problem at our company by creating a simple batch file that will run every time that the user logs in to his/her computer.  This idea was given to me from a local user that manages over 35 licenses of SolidWorks and probably closer to a 100 users (by using network licenses).

To create your batch file simply open a program like Notepad and right a command similar to the image below.  When using the xcopy command you will need to follow a format like this.

xcopy “source location” “destination location”

The symbols following that are command switches telling windows how to handle this situation.  To find out what these commands mean follow this link.  The last part of this command line writes a log file so that you can diagnose problems should they occur.

After you have written your command you will need to save the file somewhere that you can easily access.  My suggestion would be to great a “Batch Files” folder on your C: that you can save this file and any future batch files in.  To save a batch file, give it a file name and add a .BAT extension to the end of it.  Once you have saved your newly created batch file, RMB click on it and select Send to > Desktop (create shortcut).  You can see this in the image below.

After you have a shortcut to the file on your desktop, open up your Windows Startup folder.  You can do this by RMB clicking the “Startup” and select Open Folder.  Now drag the shortcut from your desktop into the Startup folder.

Once it is in there, RMB click the shortcut and select Properties.  In the Run dropdown, select Minimized.  This will make it less obvious during startup that this is running.

By doing this, you can now be no further than a day behind to in working off of the same files.  I don’t know about you but I would rather have the lag at startup as opposed to when I am working on a design.  As a SolidWorks administrator this can save you many headaches.

Please feel free to drop me a comment and let me know how you handle your SolidWorks templates.