Tag: General Session

SWW09 Monday General Session (Part 1)

The General Session hall filled up quickly.  As I mentioned, excitement was in the air.  Over 4300 people filed in quickly to take their seats.  This was well over this year’s goal (something like 3500 {unofficially}).  The music started and then we were greeted by Jeff Ray’s enthusiastic and confident entrance on to the big stage.  He presented us with a report card about how well SolidWorks is doing.  Despite his cheerful presentation about the progress SolidWorks Corp has made over the past year, he gave the company suprizingly low markets on their progress.  Of course, there are likely some people that felt he was being too generous.

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He stated that customer satisfaction is now 91%, with very satisfied now at 43%.  Customer Portal had 1.2M visits last year with 10M hits.  SolidWorks now supports 16 languages, up from 12 last year.

Ray then revealed that according to customer feedback, SolidWorks is running 65% faster on large assemblies and drawings, giving 8x the time savings with new tools such as Speedpak.

Customer interface has been a focal point of improvement, along with giving a more consist user experience by providing wide screen and multiple monitor support.  He announced that 50% of users now spend 70% of their job time within SolidWorks. 

Ray gave a shout out of sorts to the SolidWorks blogging community and even discussed Twitter’s role in the SolidWorks general online community; even to the point of announcing the SolidWorks World 2009 twitter hash #SWW09! (More about this later.)

He stated that the areas where Solidworks needs to improve are installations, upgrades and managing SolidWorks design data.  The phrasology he used was that they needed to “obliterate” each of these.  I think he meant that they will work on obliterating issues with these.  For example, they want to make it easier to access the design data so that users can focus on why they have SolidWorks (designing) instead of hunting for files.

He then showed appreciation for all attendees, noting that some are here dispite the fact that they are recently out of work or had expense cutbacks at their company.

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 3 (Jan 23) General Session

Several presentations stand out in my mind from the Wednesday General Session.  This was the session that really got down to the business of talking about the SolidWorks community and the future of the SolidWorks software.

Richard Doyle introduced the SWUGN regional leaders to the General Session.  I’m guessing this is the first time many people even heard of this group. This is an important group that is responsible for increasing the number of SolidWorks User Groups nationwide; and worldwide too.

SWUGN Leadership

Another memorable presentation was Engineers in Crisis comedy skit used to introduce us to many of the new functions and improvements that will appear in SolidWorks 2009.  The skit consisted of a supposed talk show host addressing many frustrations that CAD users (unnamedly SolidWorks users) experienced when using their CAD software.  The frustration was collectively referred to as PAS (Performance Addiction Syndrome).

Engineering in Crisis

Who isn’t addicted to something that performs well?  They showed short videos of some engineers who were going mad because of issues they were having with an unnamed CAD program.  To help, three “doctors” presented the videos and then explained the solution offered in SolidWorks 2009.  This one particular engineer in one of the stories was vexed by “too many steps.”  This was prolly the funniest of the bunch.  I remember when they showed him getting out of his co-worker’s car.  His co-worker double beeped his remote to lock his car.  The engineer (Bill, I think) preceded to yell something like, “You only need to beep it once!  Doing it twice is too many steps!  Ughh!!!”  The interviews with his boss and co-workers were icing on the cake.

PAS

Anyway, the point was that SolidWorks 2009 would be adding functionality and simplifying some tasks.  Just to name a few:

  • Big news is that SolidWorks 2009 will accept negative dimensions when adding dimension values to objects within a sketch!
  • Handling of large assemblies has improved substantially.
  • Features created at the assembly level will be transferred to the part.
  • BOM tables can now be directly added to the Model Assembly.
  • Slot tool has finally been added.  (In fact, I recently participated in a questionnaire regarding how this feature will be dimensioned on the drawing.)
  • In sketch mode, dimensioning for sizes of objects will automatically pop up and ask to be populated when the object is created.
  • Routing now supports flat cables, and so on.

This skit was immediately followed by a demonstration of the speed differences we can expect from SolidWorks 2009.  They had a side by side comparison between SolidWorks 2008 and 2009.  It does appear that performance will indeed be massively improved.  This is of course based on the presentation.  I will reserve my final judgment for when I get a chance to use 2009 for myself.