Here’s my looking-back slide show of SOLIDWORKS World 2014 in San Diego, CA.
There are generally a lot interesting posts following SolidWorks World. Here is a short sample this year:
DimXpert presentations seemed to get a lot of interest at SolidWorks World 2014. Both sessions I attended had full rooms.
All The Uses of DimXpert, a Monday morning session by Josh Spencer of 3DVision Technologies was over flowing with interested attendees. Josh went into detail about what to use DimXpert for and how to use it. He described how to leverage DimXpert in TolAnalyst and SolidWorks Drawings.
Introduction to DimXpert and Tolanalyst, a Monday afternoon session by Brian McElyea of Intuitive Research and Technology Corporation was also a full session, not just with hands-on attendees, but also observers from the session’s wait list. Brian walked attendees through hands-on usage of DimXpert and TolAnalyst with a castor assembly.
DimXpert was also featured in several Model Based Definition break-out sessions, including my own presentation on Wednesday called Model Based Definition in the Context of SolidWorks, where I went into detail about the various methods used to employ Model Based Definition and how to set up and use SolidWorks for best results.
I am interested to see how others are interested in DimXpert. Was the interest shown at SolidWorks World 2014 a fluke or indicative of general interest within Industry?
General Session
The General Session for Wednesday was as entertaining as ever. Most the details from Wednesday General Session have already been well covered by other blogs and online outlets. I’m going to focus on Bruce Holway’s presentation instead. It is important to me because he’s describing the his group (Product Definition of which I am apart) and past years SolidWorks World Top Ten enhancements list. He states that the vast majority of past year’s Top Ten have been implemented. He covers many of recent examples.
Also mentioned is the fact that we visit hundreds of customers each year at their sites to understand how they are using SolidWorks. This is extremely valuable in determining how we plan to improve our product offerings by giving us first hand experiences from our customers.
This year’s SolidWorks World Top Ten list:
User Community and Beta Highlights from General Session
Tuesday General Sessions tends to focus on the user community. Richard Doyle has become a fixture on the big stage as he gives us the SolidWorks User Group Network updates. This year he announced the following awards.
The SolidWorks Beta program for SolidWorks 2014 is the most successful yet. Here are this year’s winners for the program
Customers:
VARs:
My Hands-on Presentation
I conducted my first Hands-on Session of this year’s conference on Tuesday evening, covering the topic of drawing views. This is a new presentation at SolidWorks World. Though the presentation is intended for beginners and novice users, by going through all of the view types, even experienced users learned something they have forgotten or missed before. Several attendees showed (by a raise of heads) they learned something new from several of the exercises throughout the presentation. I may expand the presentation to cover additional topics, such as the new Replace Model in SolidWorks 2014.