PDM Page 1

TriMech carries two solutions to fit your Data Management need. Our products include SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard, and SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional. While both manage your SOLIDWORKS design files, supporting documents and product development process, there are several things that may push you into one solution over the other.

When companies switch to PDM, there is often confusion regarding versions versus revisions. Are they the same? Do you need both? How do you increase them? Can I delete them? Can I change their style? Can there be multiple types of them? So, let’s take a minute to dive a little deeper into them.

SOLIDWORKS clients often overlook the importance of having the correct hardware to support their new 3D CAD purchase. A common question we get asked is what should be considered before buying or upgrading equipment, so we thought it would be helpful to compile all the published system requirements along with our Engineering Team's recommendations in one place. Here is the information for this year's version of SOLIDWORKS as compared to last year.

Moving CAD files from one location to another may seem like a simple task, and it can be if you have a small number of files to move. In this case, it may be as easy as copy and paste, or “Pack and Go”, in the case of SOLIDWORKS CAD files.

However, moving thousands of documents on the other hand can be challenging. This could take weeks, or months. How will you work with a third party (Migration Team) to get this done in a timely manner and minimize the impact to production while maintaining the integrity of your data?

Given that you need a license to view files, people often wonder what license types are required for their company. Before we can get to how many licenses, you need to understand the differences between the PDM license types.

Everybody knows the importance of training. When you take on a new task, you need to learn the ins and outs of that new job. The same is true for becoming a SOLIDWORKS PDM administrator. It’s true, you can find a lot of resources online, and there is a PDM Administration PDF that you can look at that can give you direction, however, nothing quite matches getting trained to be your company’s PDM Administrator from someone who knows the product through and through. With that in mind, I thought I’d take a moment to tell you five things that have stuck with me as favorites from the PDM Administration course, both taking and teaching it.  

If disk space is running low, or maybe you want to move the archives to a faster disk and you need to move the archives to a different drive within the same machine, there are a couple of options for how we can do it. You can complete the move using the included relocate archive tool, or my personal favorite…get your hands dirty and manually move the files.

Have you ever tried finding a document on your computer, but can’t remember the filename or folder where it’s stored, only a word or phrase that’s in the file? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find documents using words in the file? Well, SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional offers a way to not only find documents using file or folder names in the PDM Search tool, but it can also search for documents using the content or properties in files.

So, you’ve finally made the investment and have a PDM system in place at your company. What now? To ensure that you can always have access to your intellectual property, you need to set up some backups for your system to ensure it is safe. In the world we live in of virtual machines, isn’t just doing a snapshot enough? Well…not really. So, let’s get started so that you can have full backups ready in case you ever need them.