Novedge Pulse™ of Jeff Sweeney

What are you paying for off-site backup storage? You do have off-site storage don’t you? Hey a building is just a building, but you lose your data and it is g-o-n-e! …and aren’t tapes a hassle? Trying to come up with a nice rotation schema, hoping  [more...]

Sometimes in EPDM you want to find all files that do not have a value for a field in the datacard. Your first thought may be to use a datacard to search but that doesn’t work because any fields left blank are not considered in the search criteria. You have to  [more...]

I’ve done some research. Even though all pictures from 1903 are in black in white, there were actually eight colors back then! Red, yellow, blue, green, orange, brown, purple, and black. If life would have stayed like that everything would be simper. Sadly someone  [more...]

There are lots of great things about SolidWorks World, but the most important part is the breakout sessions. Tons of topics taught by the authorities in their field. You want to attend them all but at best you’ll be able to attend 8% of them <citation needed>.  [more...]

After all of these years of Great Aunt Eleanor giving me the silent treatment, you would think I would be the world expert on being ignored. However it has always been hard for me to remember how SolidWorks Enterprise’s “Ignore permissions in previous states”  [more...]

Releasing your drawings to the machine shop with missing information makes a machinist angrier than a baby boomer looking at a teenager that doesn’t have his pants pulled up all the way. As we all know, looking through a large assembly, checking file properties can  [more...]

Hey macro lovers! Have to change a lot of SolidWorks file properties, but don't want to your code to have to open each file one at a time?

I’ll never admit this publicly, but when I’m specifying a component for my design, it’s a pretty big deal if a supplier has a nice 3D model for me to drop into my design. If other variable are pretty close, the company with the easiest to use CAD  [more...]

Every year the employees of 3DVision have a competition to see who can design the best Christmas card in SolidWorks. The winner’s image gets to be on the card the company sends out to our friends. I’ve never thought it was fair that the image had to be  [more...]

Looking to get a head start in your design/sales configuration? Next week, Driveworks is offering two free classes to help you hit the ground running with either your DriveWorksXpress or DriveWorks Solo projects. The DriveWorksXpress webinar is running on December  [more...]

Have you ever been a room and some n00b clicks the “Include drawings” options from within Pack and Go? “Wait! Wait!” Everyone in the room will shout…but the damage is done. There is nothing anyone can do but roll their eyes and scowl  [more...]

When you are the Data Specialist Man, the world is your stage. Here is a little excerpt from a screen play I am writing for an upcoming movie, tentatively titled: “SolidWorks Enterprise PDM – The Movie” The scene opens with our hero [me] teaching  [more...]

Recently a customer asked me to write a routine to release ownership of every file in his SolidWorks Workgroup PDM vault. I thought finding the files would be rather simple until I realized Workgroup’s PDMWSearchOptions (Workgroup’s API search function)  [more...]

There are five us in my house. We have four, nice computers. Until this week we were a happy family living the dream. This week the youngest had homework and we found ourselves short one computer. The fighting began. So I went to the basement, threw some parts together,  [more...]

Windows 7 Tip: Certainly one of your favorite places to be is inside your SolidWorks Enterprise PDM vault. Would you like to prove your love and add the vault to your list of favorites? Drag your blueberry into your favorites list. Make sure the cursor says “Create  [more...]

Virtual data centers (Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)) can be a very nice option for both small and large companies running SolidWorks Enterprise PDM. Here are a few advantages: You can easily adjust the “horsepower” of your server. Start small then  [more...]

One of my favorite new SolidWorks Enterprise PDM enhancements is, at least today, practically worthless….this enhancement didn’t even make it into the “What’s New” document. However its potential may make it one of the biggest EPDM enhancements  [more...]

A few weeks ago during our weekly “how are we going to take over the world” planning sessions with Lou Gallo, we were brainstorming on ways EPDM could alert you when a file had been in a workflow state more than a certain number of days. I theorized that  [more...]

Today’s the first day of fall. It is the best time of the year. Football and hockey is starting (though I’m not sure hockey season ever ends). Baseball and soccer playoffs are soon starting and the new release of SolidWorks is published. SolidWorks 2012  [more...]

Remember that kid that was always picked last to be on a kickball team? I think SolidWorks Enterprise’s Label function was that kid. Rodney Dangerfield makes fun of the EPDM’s label function. What good is it? I have seen it used three different ways. First,  [more...]

I had no idea that a simple topic of colors could have so many options in DriveWorks. Today I received an email from Glen Smith. (Yes, though you cannot prove it by his blog, he is still alive.) …. To show he still has some sweet automation skills, he made a  [more...]

Since my post about color selection in DriveWorks Solo, I’ve had several questions if DriveWorks Pro had better options. It does. With Pro, you have a lot more control over your input forms…you can replace your typical radio buttons, check boxes, etc. with  [more...]

Back in January, when Jordan Tadic published his cut lumber library for use as weldment profiles, the CAD community went crazy! For a brief period of time there was concern that we may need to get a larger server to help handle the additional page requests. Did you  [more...]

Looking for a way to convince your manager that you need PDM but you know he  only responds to pretty pictures and peppy music? It’s intervention time. Tell him there are doughnuts in the conference room, get Big Larry to stand by the door to keep him inside  [more...]

Mail Call! Dear Engineering Data Specialist Man, I have been wondering about attending a SolidWorks user group meeting. What are they like? Peyton M, Indianapolis Indiana. That is a good question Peyton, as a matter of fact I was in your town last night for a user  [more...]

Imagine you received a set of SolidWorks drawings from an outside source. Unfortunately the people who created the drawings didn’t use your drafting standards. [The peasants!] You may be tempted to create a little macro that goes through every one of your settings,  [more...]

SolidWorks Enterprise PDM’s (EPDM) customized workflows make it rather easy to duplicate many processes within an organization. As an example, a common request I get during implementations is to incorporate a company’s existing Engineering Change Notice (ECN) process  [more...]

A wise man once said: “The fastest way to open a document is to not have to open it in the first place.”  When I said that, I meant  I want my data fast, if I can skip the step of having to open an application first it’s all good. I just learned today  [more...]

Great Aunt Eleanor can do many amazing things. She can name and describe all RAID configurations, she can rewire an HDMI connection so her old black and white movies will be black and white again (she curses Ted Turner the entire time) and apparently she is the lead  [more...]

You know the default EPDM Web interface? Kinda pretty eh? People all over the world are using it. Yet I still hear complaints: “It’s ActiveX so my users can only use Internet Explorer”, “It’s kind of plain”, “My back hurts”,  [more...]

Use Excel as your DriveWorksXpress equation editor.

Pizza -without a doubt, mankind’s greatest achievement. It doesn’t take a back seat to being on the moon or even those over-hyped pyramids. However, I’ve argued even DriveWorks is better than pizza. Here is why: SolidWorks’ “Pack and  [more...]

Hey Windows 7 users, recognize this? Yup, it is our new SolidWorks Enterprise PDM’s tool bar, Pretty ain’t she? The other day I noticed something while looking at an XP machine: That blueberry on the left looks like a button…so I hovered over it  [more...]