The Easy Way to Work from Home with your SOLIDWORKS Team

By

The current situation with COVID-19 necessitates working from home for many engineers. SOLIDWORKS® has tools at your disposal, right now, that will help you share, review, annotate, and validate designs with your engineering team from the comfort of your home office. And it is quick and easy to setup.

The Collaborative Business Innovator, which resides on the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE® platform, has the necessary apps to get the job done conveniently from your home office—just think of the apps as functionality—to make it happen. The below example shows you the basics of how to set up a collaborative environment for you and your team to review a model.

Create a Dashboard
This is where you manage and view all the information captured in your (project) communities.

Create New Community and Add Members
Create a new community with the 3DSwym app and give it a name such as Model Design Review & Validation community. Invite co-workers (“Members”) to join your community. Because you are working from the cloud, all information is shared in real-time. Send a message (“Post”) to your community and give them a heads up regarding the model review project.

Create a New Tab for Model Review
Use the 3DDrive app to upload the files and share it with your team members for model design review

Review CAD Model and Fix Issues
Use the 3DPlay app to review, mark, comment, and measure the file and, if you discover issues, let your team know what is going on and assign a task to fix the problems.

 

Modify CAD Model in SOLIDWORKS

Utilize 3DDrive connector for SOLIDWORKS to open CAD files directly from the SOLIDWORKS task pane to make necessary changes.

Because the Collaborative Business Innovator is on the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform, there is no need to get your IT department involved to set up a VPN connection or supply new software or deal with hardware issues.

The co-workers you invite into the Model Design Review & Validation community simply click on a link to get involved in the project. It’s that easy.

More About the Apps (functionality)

3DSwym is where everyone comes together as a team on one common platform to share information in real-time. You can make posts, discuss projects, create tasks, ask questions, and more.

3DDrive is fully integrated with SOLIDWORKS; it enables you to keep your files in a single location on the cloud and securely share them. You can even allow vendors to access data for review and download in a secure environment. And it auto-synchs to Windows.

3DPlay enables you to interrogate the models—zoom, rotate, take measurements—and make comments. Publish your design directly from 3DPlay to your community for feedback on your design.

3DSearch enables search through any metadata or files stored in the platform. You can easily search for data on the platform using the 6WTags filter.

By leveraging the Collaborative Business Innovator,you can start working from home as a team today. Because everyone works from a common platform, all communications, changes, and tasks are captured in every project—kind of like a built-in audit trail.

If you have further questions, please contact your local reseller. And, please feel free to share your comments below.

Salih Alani

Salih Alani

Salih Alani joined SOLIDWORKS in 2013. He held SOLIDWORKS technical support position focused on core SOLIDWORKS, DraftSight, licensing (Online Licensing), and Lead Technical Support of 3D CONTENTCENTRAL, Technical Support Account Manager for Enterprise Subscription Services (ESS) customer account and lead organizer for VAR Performance Tuning Workshop in Dassault Systèmes Waltham before he joined the SOLIDWORKS Product Management Team in 2020. He is now focused on 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS cloud roles along with collaboration on the 3DEPERIENCE Platform. Salih Alani is Graduate of the University of Technology, Iraq - Baghdad with BS in Mechanical Engineering, graduate of Northeastern University with a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in mechanics and design.