A day without Vik is like a day without Simulation

It was the morning of the “What’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2009” show in Bowling Green, Kentucky. In my free copy of USA Today, I was reading about the stock market drop and feeling rather sad.

One of our Enterprise customers came in and sat next to me. They have been running Enterprise for a few weeks now and wanted to tell me how much he loved it. Before they bought Enterprise, they were replicating their design data by sharing an ftp site among their cooperate divisions. When a designer wanted to work with any files, they would copy the files from the ftp site on to their local server, modify the files then move the files back to the ftp site -overwriting the old version. Sounds good in practice except for two things:

1. Designers wouldn’t always remember to move the files back to the ftp site, thus they would have multiple copies of the same file on several servers and it was difficult to find the latest version
2. On occasion more than one designer would be working on the same file at a time. In this case, they suffered the old “last on in wins” syndrome. -The slower designer’s change became the one of record and the other designer’s work was lost.

Now that Enterprise is handling their replication, these problems are quickly fading away. It is nice to hear those kinds of success stories. Did it make me feel any better [because now I won’t be able to retire until I am 99 years old]? Nope. Though it is nice to hear stories of how SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM is making people’s lives easier.

Vik Vedantham didn’t make the trip down. I have no idea what he was wearing. Sorry no update today.

I asked a few of the hotel maids if they would pose as groupies for a photo. They all declined. I can’t even get people to pretend to be groupies for these events.

Off to Evansville, Indiana.