PDMWE 2009

Same question here... has anyone upgraded to PDMWE 2009, and if so... what is your opinion of it?

There doesn't appear to be much changed under the hood. I don't imagine people's evaluation period will need to be very long.

The user interface inside of the SW addin, the better workflow notifications, and weldment cut lists in the database get the biggest thumbs up for me.

Eeeah...true, true a lot of improvements to those named BOMs. I just haven't fallen in love with them yet.

So the BOMs are actually updating in 2009? That has been a huge headache for us setting up 2008.

Is the SolidWorks integration improved significantly? If so, what has improved about it?

(I'm trying to talk my boss into upgrading us to 2009 since we just got 2008 in August and I'm not even done getting it set up to roll out to engineering yet.. I'd prefer to upgrade BEFORE I'm done getting 2008 set up.)

Joy,

Thank-You Sooooooooo Much!!!

Christina

Another question... is anyone running PDMWE 2009 with SolidWorks 2008? And what features of PDM 2009 don't work at all or don't work correctly when you're using SolidWorks 2008?

I know of at least two installations that are running this way....and since you can't run Enterprise 2008 with SW 2009, I imagine this will be the upgrade path for most -upgrading Enterprise first, run a few days, then upgrade SW.

The only thing I have found is that does not work is the new BOM stuff (including weldment cut lists and the ability to read BOMs actually in the SW file) does not work when the SW files are still in the old format.

yeah.. it mentioned in the PDF that Joy provided that the new BOM stuff didn't work with SolidWorks 2008... that got me wondering if anything else didn't work quite right.

Knowing my company and how panicky that are about upgrading SolidWorks, they'll want to stay on 2008 for a while, apparently when they went from 2006 to 2008 everything they had built fell apart. But considering that we're not even using SolidWorks in production yet, you'd think they wouldn't be so paranoid. I think i've got them considering upgrading PDM though... cross my fingers... knock on wood...

Thanks guys for your input!!

I upgraded our Engineering Dept several weeks back. 2008 was giving us too many headaches on the new 64bit XP workstations we recently acquired. 2009 addresses many of these bugs but also introduced a couple of newbies. We are totally unable to view ANY thimbnail previews in either Windows Explorer or SW.
There is a fix for this providing you are running dual 2008 & 2009 versions (which we arent).

I am currently testing PDMW as an isolated installation. Finding the system hangs momentarily (5-10 sec) whenever trying to move or mate components. I understand this is nothing unique or new to 2009 but is likely to be the death of it in our workplace unless our VAR can suggest some solutions (which so far they can't)

All in all, the core product is running quite nicely though.

Our upgrade from 2008 SP3 to 2009 this weekend went well.
It took about 12 hrs to upgrade a 460 Gb vault.
We needed our VAR's assistance a couple times, they were very helpful. Once because our license file did not work and the second time we noticed the Web Server was selected when updating clients, I think we determined that the web server wasn't getting installed.

I noticed it takes 9 seconds from the time I choose logon until the green folders are displayed. This seems about twice as long as before.

One of our 12 Inventor 2009 users noticed the add-in and used it.
Most of our 8 Solidworks 2008 users turn off the PDMWE add-in until they need it.
The other 50 AutoCAD users are happily working with no PDMWE complaints.