The HRS Blog – SolidWorks and CAMWorks

There has been a lot of chatter in the SolidWorks community recently into what the future holds for Workgroup PDM. Since I don’t work for SolidWorks, I don’t know exactly what the answer to that question is but I thought I would share some pretty valuable insights to help users come to an educated conclusion.

I want to start this blog entry off by saying that SolidWorks has NOT announced an end of life date yet for Workgroup PDM, nor has it been confirmed to anyone here at Hawk Ridge that Workgroup PDM is being discontinued in the near future. SolidWorks is very good about treating their customer base with respect, and I know they would never pull a product from their portfolio without ample notification to the user community – so for the time being you can rest assured that Workgroup will live on.

That being said, there are a few things you should keep in mind when thinking about the future of Workgroup PDM:

1. Workgroup PDM was originally written many years ago (circa 96), and it was written on a very old and limited architecture compared with today’s standards. The limited architecture really dampens the potential for enhancement with the tool, which is why you see very little mentioned about Workgroup PDM from release to release. When the largest enhancement in the last few years is a minimize button on the Admin tool, you can get a feeling for just how much development effort goes into it. This is also why the Workgroup PDM server application does not run as a 64-bit program.
2. A large number of Workgroup PDM users experience performance issue with the tool based on the outdated architecture. The way the server program accesses file information is not meant to handle large loads of data, especially because it can’t run as a 64-bit program. Changing this fundamental process and updating the architecture to support it would be a monstrous job and relatively inefficient given that SolidWorks has a tool with the proper architecture already (Enterprise PDM). Don’t expect to see any performance improvements in Workgroup PDM anytime soon.
3. The most interesting observation is that SolidWorks has started a Registration/Validation process for Workgroup PDM server installs. It used to be you could just install the Workgroup PDM server and be on your way and SolidWorks had no idea who was using the tool. With the new validation code requirement during installation (if you have tried to install Workgroup PDM server 2012 or 2013, you’ve seen this requirement), SolidWorks is tracking just how many people are actually using the software. I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to why they would want to know that.

Again, I want to reinforce the SolidWorks has not officially announced an end of life date for Workgroup PDM yet so Workgroup PDM users can rest easy for now however the information above should speak volumes as to what the future will hold.

If you’re interested in seeing side by side performance differences between Workgroup PDM and Enterprise PDM, you won’t want to miss this webinar on April 26, 2013 – register now.

You might also want to check out the Learning Paths for Enterprise PDM.

If Windows folders aren’t good enough for your music files, why are they good enough for your design files?

At SolidWorks World this year, I heard Paul Giaconia of SolidWorks use an analogy that really struck a chord.  Why do people spend so much time organizing and using management tools for their multimedia files, yet spend almost no effort organizing and using management tools for their critical design files?

A great example that comes to mind is iTunes.  Here we have a tool that most users spend countless hours on creating playlists, downloading album art, searching, etc. all for the sake of making the experience of finding and listening to their music effortless and enjoyable.

Can you imagine how difficult a task that would be if you were using Windows Explorer?

First, you would have to decide how to store the files.  Do you create artist folders? Album folders?  Song Title? What happens if you want to search for a song but can’t remember the artist or the album name? What happens if you want to find all songs by a certain artist but store the songs by title?  With iTunes, you can simply move back and forth between those organization structures on a single button click – and even better, you can search with just a few characters.  Heck, you could even find all songs about “lightning” by running a search on that word.

Extend this logic over to your business critical design files and you can see why storing them in Windows folders just doesn’t make sense.  Not only does a system like SolidWorks Enterprise PDM get you the flexibility to store and search for files however you want (search on vendor, customer, material, etc.), it also provides a completely secure environment. Files are controlled, and revisions are managed automatically, so you don’t get someone “accidentally” messing up one of them.  When you look even further into this and realize the average multimedia file is worth about 99 cents and the average design file is worth tens of thousands of dollars,  you have even more reason to get those files secured and controlled.  I’m pretty sure that no matter how much you like music, if you lost all your music files tomorrow it wouldn’t be a catastrophe. What is the cost if you lose your design files?

If you haven’t looked into data management lately, prepare to be pleasantly surprised. The ease of use factor is comparable to iTunes. Your design files – and your development team – deserve a secure system.

Learn more about SolidWorks Enterprise PDM – Download this whitepaper: PDM Made Easy for the Mainstream Enterprise.

The 2013 release of SolidWorks Enterprise PDM is full of usability enhancements to make your life inside the PDM system much easier.  You will notice some difference from the moment you log into the system but I wanted to take a moment to share my 3 favorite enhancements with you.

1)      Parallel Workflow Transitions – This is a feature we have wanted in Enterprise PDM for years and I am happy that it’s finally here because that means the workarounds of using voting loops and extra transitions are gone.  This new functionality adds a transition type called “Parallel” in which you can define users and groups who have voting access and you can define how many votes a file needs to move forward.  It’s significantly easier now to have parallel approvals than it was in the past.

2)      Delayed in State Notifications – Delayed in State Notifications are a great way to gently remind users that they may have work to do.  It’s easy to get an e-mail from the vault about files which require your action but it’s equally as easy to ignore that e-mail and forget about it in your inbox.  The Delayed in State option will now allow you to re-email users about critical actions after a set time period has passed.  You can also control how often the notifications are sent after the initial time period has passed.  One note, time periods can only be controlled in days, not minutes and these notifications are added at the State level, not the Transition level.

3)      Version Free Variables – Version free variables are another much requested feature which has found its way into Enterprise PDM this year.  You can now mark any variable as Version Free and doing that will allow users to change the value WITHOUT checking out the file.  This is fantastic for data card fields like “Comments” where you would like users to record information and feedback about a file without giving them edit access to the file.

If you would like more information on these or any of the other great enhancements in Enterprise PDM 2013 please reference the “What’s New Guides” or contact us at 877-266-4469 in the US, 866-587-6803 in Canada, or e-mail us at info@hawkridgesys.com

Recently I was testing a new workflow and I got to a point where I was unable to transition a file any further.  I started to review the groups and users in the workflow to figure out which had permission to permit the transition.   During this time I wondered if there was another way to view all transitions in order to verify Permit Permissions for either a user or a group.

To simplify the process I was thinking about, I concentrated just on groups and then needed to verify that I had given the permission to at least one group for each transition. For this I needed to identify the information directly in the SQL Database.  I opened the database in Microsoft SQL Studio Management to review the GroupTransitionRights tables which I thought had all the information.  I found that I needed to review several tables to find the transition names and groups that had rights to each transition and the group names. Armed with the locations of information, I used a little SQL query building knowledge and created a query that combined the three tables that neatly and logically displayed the permit permissions.

To display the query output results run the query from the Vault database in the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio tool:

The results neatly and logically display the column names; Transition Name, Groupname and WorkFlow Name which correspond to the permit permissions for each transition and group. As I built the query I realized there might be duplicate transition names and I needed a way to distinguish one from the other so that is why I included the WorkFlow Name column.

With this list in hand I was able to go back and add the appropriate permit permission for the groups.  Now that I have saved the query I can open it again in the future to check that I assigned permit permission to at least one group for each transition.