SolidWorks 2005 Tech Tip: New Collaboration Settings
by Keith Schaefer, Technical Analyst, CATI
 

 As I read through all of the articles and discussions on the new tools in SolidWorks 2005 I came to realize that many new enhancements were being overlooked.  SolidWorks 2005 offers some extremely helpful additional options in the area of design collaboration.

While the best case scenario is to have a properly installed and configured PDM system, I think that the addition of the multi-user environment in the new release has the potential to benefit a large percentage of our customers working in a group on the same dataset.

The new settings in the multi-user environment are located in the tools, options, system options area of the software.  On the left hand side of the window a new section labeled collaboration has been added to the bottom of the window.

The first option, Enable multi-user environment, starts the multi use tools.  Once this is checked you will then be able to configure the rest of the options that you would like use.

When the option “Add shortcut menu items for the multi-user environment” is checked it will added menu items for “make read only” and “get write access”.   These options will now be accessible from the right click menu.  The read and write access of any document can now be swapped quickly and easily with a  single right click.

You can also enable the “Check if files opened read-only have been modified by other users”, and specify a time interval.  When enabled this option will look at the files that you have open for read-only access, and check to see if other users have made any changes or updates.  SolidWorks will prompt you that documents have changed, and allow you to reload the data.

With the collaboration settings enabled SolidWorks will also tell you, by user name, who has the documents open for write access.  This should eliminate the who is using that file guessing game.