So many batches

Most of us have been tasked with the mind-numbing task of printing all drawings associated with an assembly, or even worse all drawings of a project! There are many programs out there that can help you do this, many of them you can download rather economically from the Internet or perhaps your PDM program can do this, both ideas help reduce your mouse clicks but nearly all of them run locally on your machine. This could mean spending hours watching as your files are opened one at a time being compiled for your printer.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to offload this work to another computer so you can do something else? Why don’t you use your DriveWorks Server to do this? DriveWorks Server typically spends its day searching for specifications produced by your design automation system but nothing says it only has to do DriveWorks work! With only a little customization it can be a great tool that could be used for your other batch related processes. All it needs is a set of directions and it will take off and do the mundane tasks for you. The possibilities are endless consider: converting a group of files to .pdf/.dxf/.iges etc. …any time you need to open a group of files and perform a repeated task, Server could do that off-line for you!

One last thought…if you let DriveWorks Server do this work for you the requesting user doesn’t even need to have SOLIDWORKS installed on their machine to do these tasks! Here are two examples: Imagine your documentation department routinely bothers you for simple renderings of your SOLIDWORKS parts? They could notify DriveWorks Server to open the file for them, do the rendering and save the rendered image in a location where the documentation guy could then pick up the file and do what ever he wants with it! Imagine being able to allow your laser cut guys to request their own flat patterns in dxf format for your sheet metal parts…the machinist requests the file, DriveWorks Server opens the file creates the flat pattern and saves the dxf file in a location where the machinist can open the file for himself.