2013 Beta Program

SOLIDWORKS 2013 Beta is coming fast (in June)!  If you’ve never participated in the program before, consider the following reasons to join the beta team:

• If you want SOLIDWORKS to get better, there’s never a more influential period of time to communicate directly with the SOLIDWORKS development team.  About 90% of the feedback I gave them last year was implemented before SP0!  This is a period of hectic enhancement implementations.  If you want to see a tweak to the tools, interface, or any other bit of the software after SP0 has been released, chances are, you’ll have to submit an enhancement request and wait until next year  …that’s not the case in Beta though.
• Most large companies do quite a bit of in-house testing before upgrading to the next major release of SolidWorks.  The premise of this testing is to ensure the new version of SOLIDWORKS integrates with their custom processes and other business systems seamlessly.  If testing is going to be done before upgrading, why not do it during the Beta phase!?  Rather than being forced to develop creative solutions to problems on the fly, have the SOLIDWORKS Beta Development Team fix that problem before it ever gets a chance to exist in the official release.
• During the Beta phase, there are plenty of contests and prizes handed out to the most active participants.  This is the one time you’ll actually get rewarded for finding bugs in SolidWorks.  You’ll also have a chance to showcase your creativity with modeling and rendering contests as well.

If you’re a SOLIDWORKS user, there’s absolutely no reason not to try out SOLIDWORKS Beta 2013.  Just be sure to use ‘Pack and Go‘ to make completely separate copies of your existing data to test in 2013.  Remember, once you save a file in a later release, you won’t be able to open it up in a prior release  …right?  [wink, wink]  ;  )