What to Do When PDMWorks Workgroup Gets Spooky

PDMWorks Workgroup is a great tool for keeping your team working together. It can, at times, get a little bit strange in it’s behavior. This time of year, one might be tempted to blame ghosts or the supernatural, but there are a couple of more rational things to check before blaming the phase of the moon.

The first trick has been discussed here before. It is a good practice to stop and start the vault on a regular basis. When the PDMWorks vault has been running for an extended period of time, it can become less reliable and less
responsive.  Check the link above on how to set up your system to do this automatically. You will be rewarded with the treat of better performance and reliability.

Another issue that can cause PDMWorks to act as if it has bats in it’s belfry is when the client and server
are on different service packs. This can happen when testing new service packs of SolidWorks.

When you are ready to deploy the new service pack to everyone, you should always update the server first. This way, even if you don’t  get around to updating all the workstations at the same time, PDMWorks will download the latest client next time the user connects to the server.

The fastest way to check for this problem while in SolidWorks is to go to the Help/About PDMWorks Work group … menu. It will display something similar to the image at the left. As long as both are  the same version, everything is great. If the Vault is older, talk to the person in charge of the Vault and get an upgrade scheduled, BEFORE ITS TOO LATE!