Blog Sneak peek at SOLIDWORKS 2010
Wednesday is always my favorite day of SOLIDWORKS World. It is the day we get a sneak peek into what SOLIDWORKS is working on for the next version of SolidWorks.
I didn’t see anything earth-shattering in SOLIDWORKS 2010. It reminded me a lot of the 2009 sneak peek…lots of little usability enhancements. I tried to write them all down; but they were going so fast, my notes are more like scribbles. Apparently SolidSmack can write faster than I. There were two Enterprise PDM enhancements that caught my eye:
- Toolbox will now be in the vault. Today the files go in the vault, but the supporting information is still outside. This is a little messy in a multi-site installation. Perhaps we will no longer have to suffer with the Microsoft Access file?! Sweet!
- I am not sure I fully understood this one, but it appears we will be able to offload chores to a server now? Printing? Conversions? Printing?! Finally!
[As always, none of these things are promised for the next release, but it is still pretty fun to see what may be!]
For the first two technical sessions, there really weren’t any that I “had to see”, then for the third session there were three that I wanted to attend. I want to be in charge of scheduling next year! [No, not really]
As I mentioned Friday, the third session I attended was “Innovation Management in Manufacturing” by Don Richardson.
His presentation started off with the a statement: The best inventors die poor, it is the innovators who make the real money. Essentially saying, you may have a good invention, but it is more important to get your idea to the market in a way that inspires people to buy it. Since I do not like being poor, at this point I sat up and took notice.
Don’s assistant (sadly I did not write down his name) then showed a system Microsoft has developed to help companies share ideas and promote innovation from within. The system can be downloaded for free from Microsoft (though it requires MS SQL, Project and SharePoint as backbone infrastructure). If you are looking for a way to get your entire organization involved in your innovation process, I highly recommend you visiting Microsoft’s EMP Connect web site.