Last February at 3DEXPERIENCE World, Executive VP Gian Paolo Bassi made the bold announcement that in July, all new licenses of SOLIDWORKS would come with Cloud Services. As an eyewitness, I can attest that the crowd went wild. It sounded like a sound marriage – the SOLIDWORKS we all know and love, combined with the power of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. A seamless integration between CAD and cloud. What’s not to like about that? We dreamed of easier team collaboration, data management without all the fuss, sharing and mark-up with anyone and much more. Let’s face it, we want to focus more on design and less on pesky file management.
Dassault Systèmes delivered as promised in July. What exactly does that mean to you, should you choose to purchase a new license of SOLIDWORKS? Let’s take a look.
CAD-Aware Cloud Storage
Your SOLIDWORKS models and assemblies can become quite complex (especially if you work with other designers). How much time do you waste recreating data, searching for information and incorporating changes? Imagine renaming a part and not having to do any extra work, such as relinking and updating assemblies and file paths.
Cloud Services provides you with online storage that understands the intricacies of CAD relationships and protects you from the common pitfalls of designing with others. And it is simple, because you save your data to the cloud right inside of SOLIDWORKS, as seen in figure 1.
Figure 1. Save to the cloud from inside of SOLIDWORKS.
If you are working with other designers, simply lock your designs to ensure nobody can overwrite your hard work. SOLIDWORKS with Cloud Services means a single source of truth – no misplaced outdated duplicates. The icing on the cake? When you save your designs on the cloud, you can access them from anywhere. Work from home, the office or a white sandy beach – the choice is yours.
Cloud Services also makes managing revisions a piece of cake. No more need for complex file names. Just perform a Save and indicate a revision, as seen in figure 2. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform will keep track of revisioning for you. You can go home early — with your mind at peace.
Figure 2. Creating revisions is easy with Cloud Services.
With Cloud Services, you’ll become so organized you’ll feel like the Marie Kondo of CAD.
Collaboration and Markup
A variety of great apps come with your Cloud Services that lend themselves to robust collaboration and mark-up. The 3D Markup App allows markups on the actual model (so you aren’t creating a duplicate) that you can share with your team, as seen in Figure 3. The end result is a full digital paper trail of markups and comments. No screenshots needed. No harm done to the model either.
Figure 3. 3D Markup comes with a robust set of tools.
The Collaborative Tasks app creates a handy online to-do list that is accessible directly in SOLIDWORKS, as seen in Figure 4. This will ensure that your team remains organized and on task. You can even attach the actual CAD model to the task by dragging and dropping it onto the task so there is no doubt about what needs to be done. When a task is completed, simply drag and drop it to the “completed” column.
Figure 4. Collaborative Tasks app keeps you on time and on track.
The Compare app can be used to verify if assigned changes were actually made (or made correctly). These are just a few of the powerful apps that come with Cloud Services. So many apps…so little time.
Share Your 3D Designs with Anyone
With SOLIDWORKS and Cloud Services, you can share your designs with anyone – even if they don’t have SOLIDWORKs – directly from within SOLIDWORKS. Now that sounds like some smooth collaboration going on. Getting real-time feedback from suppliers or outside consultants and iterating on your work is as easy as sharing links. No viewers to install, because everything happens in a web browser. All the stakeholder needs to do is set up a free 3DEXPERIENCE ID account to get the collaboration ball rolling.
And it isn’t just about viewing; there are some great markup capabilities as well. Check out this video to see Share and Mark-up in action.
The workflow is simple:
- Click on “Share a File” from the “Lifecycle and Collaboration” toolbar in SOLIDWORKS.
- Type in an email address and your message.
- Click a button to share the file and the recipient gets an email with a link to view/mark-up your design. They can do this on any web browser on any device.
- You get a notification inside of SOLIDWORKS when they provide feedback.
- You can view their comments and markups and can communicate back and forth without ever leaving your comfy SOLIDWORKS environment. It doesn’t get much easier than this.
And your data is always secure. When you share your model, you get to assign access rights (and you can change those any time you like).
Be sure to check out the amazing Cloud Services that come with every new license of SOLIDWORKS. Feeling left out because you aren’t buying any new SOLIDWORKS licenses? Worry not – there is a pathway for you to add Cloud Services to your existing SOLIDWORKS license, as well. Just contact your reseller for more information.
SOLIDWORKS with Cloud Services is definitely going to make your everyday design life a little bit easier and a lot more organized. Try them out today.