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Upgrade or Downgrade??

Question asked by 1-7YLSBT on Jan 20, 2009
Latest reply on Jan 21, 2009 by Jason Capriotti

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We currently have seven seats of SW2007 Standard, One Seat of 2007 Office, and a standalone version of Cosmos. We have been paying the Subscription services for years now. Now I hope that I am wrong about this, but in order to move to 2009 and keep all of the licensing the same, I have to pay to have our Solidworks Office seat upgraded to Professional since Office is no longer available. So am I essentially downgrading that license?

Also.... We do not currently need all seven seats at this time due to workload, so we were thinking about chancing that workload does not change this year and allowing the subscription on a couple of our seats expire, but I have been informed that if I do that, I cannot apply service packs to those seats. Is that true too? Even if I do an admin install of SW09 on all workstations, download the SPx.exe and apply it locally?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. I just want to keep our VAR in check that they aren't seeing dollar signs and taking advantage of it.

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1-7YLSBT Jan 20, 2009 12:30 PM
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I have been informed... and again please let me know if I am mistaken.... that we don't lose features. If we have things like Toolbox in use in the 2007 version, we will not lose those by upgrading to 2009, even though Toolbox is not offered unless you purchase 09 Pro.

Please correct me on this, or answer one of my other originally posted questions if you can!
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Ricky Gutierrez Jan 20, 2009 12:36 PM
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i cannot say much about the tool box but what i have heard from my VARs is similar to what you already know. If you do not pay for subscriptions then no technically you are not supposed to apply any service packs to that license. In addition. say you let 2 of your 2008 sp5 subscriptions lapse and then you realize that you are going to need them again in 2010 well it will be a substantial cost to bring those 2008 licenses to 2010 subscription almost the difference of buying new ones. Now again we thought of doing the same kind of things as right now for the past 6 months we have 2 seats that are just sitting there looking pretty. because of the information we got from our vars it was decided to keep those licenses on the subscription service. silly i know. but what can you do?
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Jason Capriotti Jan 20, 2009 12:53 PM
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Ben, we have a Sw Office license. You don't have to upgrade or downgrade it as far as I know. It still shows up on our network license file.
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- John Matrishon @ Jason Capriotti on Jan 20, 2009 3:39 PM
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  Ben, SWks Office and Professional are the same. The verbage just changed. You currently have SolidWorks, Office Professional, or Premium. You should be able to find a comparison of the differences on their webpage.
  
  We run all Office Professional here, because we have PDM Workgroup which comes with it, and the maintenance is cheaper by the package. You would need to pay a fee if your service went out of date, which means you couldn't upgrade those seats you let slip, but you could still use them at their current version because your company owns them. You just wouldn't be able to share files from the new version with the old ones.
  
  Talk to your VAR and get the exact cost to re-instate a license if it slipped. These things change from time to time.
  
  If you have no Data management, and have 6 seats you may want to think about upgrading all your seats to Office Pro......but it's an expense.
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  - Jason Capriotti @ John Matrishon on Jan 20, 2009 5:38 PM
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    The original Swx office package did not include PDMworks, thats the only difference between it and Pro.
    
    It costed a little more than just core SolidWorks but its maintenace was the same. Then the Pro version came out and they discontinued Office but its still supported.
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    - John Matrishon @ Jason Capriotti on Jan 20, 2009 6:29 PM
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      Jason Capriotti wrote:
      
      The original Swx office package did not include PDMworks, thats the only difference between it and Pro.
      
      It costed a little more than just core SolidWorks but its maintenace was the same. Then the Pro version came out and they discontinued Office but its still supported.
      
      I believe Jason is right, it's my memory that's bad. When SolidWorks bought out PDM Works, they added it to Pro.
      
      Now, about this PDM Workgroups that comes with Pro, it's no slouch. You should take the time to really look close at it, especially if the group of you share files.
      
      You will not be able to upgrade your unsupported version. After SW2007 sp3.1 , solidworks now has online activation. This helps protects the licensing.
      
      I won't answer the Beta software comment, I've been doing this for many years now, and if you'd like to bash, then I suggest you leave that for another forum.
      
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      - 1-7YLSBT @ John Matrishon on Jan 21, 2009 2:49 PM
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        Thanks for the input everyone. BTW, sorry if it seemed like bashing, we are using Solidworks for a reason, and I am no rookie myself (Catia V4, V5, Solidworks '97 and up, Inventer 3.0 and up, Mechanical Desktop, Acad Dumb Solids, Cadam, and before that the Drafting Board.), so I know how far they have come.
        
        We have just been so busy with work that by the time I can lift my head up to see what's happening, the game has changed! And anymore, a wrong decision is typically a costly one.
        
        I will take PDM for Workgroups into consideration on your recommendation then John, and see what it has to offer. We know we need it, but in a perfect world we would spend the 45k and go all in.
        
        In the meantime....seems actively used seats need to remain on subscription.
        
        Thanks again!
        
        Bret.
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  - 1-7YLSBT @ John Matrishon on Jan 20, 2009 5:39 PM
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    Thanks for the input so far.....
    
    I agree... the verbage has changed. We considered SWPro across the board, but there is an upgrade fee per seat to go to Pro, plus the maintenance fee which has to be paid prior to upgrading (no problem, have to pay our maintenance anyhow.)
    
    The problem I have is that they are attempting to charge us an upgrade fee for our one seat of SW Office to SW Pro. Which seems to me like I am paying for a Verbage change. Feature wise they are the pretty close to the same softwares.
    
    They can't sell me on this scaled down version of their PDM as a must have at this point. If we were to go to PDM it would be "all in" because I am sure that the features of PDM that we really need are not included with Pro, like 3rd party document management, file searches and file properties propagation. I really don't know enough about this "included" version of PDM to know it's advantages.
    
    You know... I am making a big stink about something we don't use. We don't use the Toolbox now, although I can see some benefit if I can tie it in to our existing part library and naming conventions and make searches easier, but there is going to be a big investment there on our part to get that set up.
    
    My real question is if I have 5 seats under subscription, is there a way I can download and apply service packs to my three remaining un-suscribed seats? Does the EULA state that I cannot do that.
    
    Sorry about my ramblings. But as is posted in other threads, they are selling us Beta software, and making us pay them to fix it through subscribing to their yearly maintenance programs.
    
    Thanks again!
    
    Bret.
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Ricky Gutierrez Jan 20, 2009 8:30 PM
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i dont believe that you can legally do that bret. ask the question to your VARs they will tell you that machines that are not on a subscription are not supposed to get service packs applied.
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John Lhuillier Jan 20, 2009 8:48 PM
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If you purchased a standalone Toolbox with the SW standard when it was offered, you can still use it with the standard SW on 2009.
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- Jason Capriotti @ John Lhuillier on Jan 21, 2009 9:07 PM
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  That is correct, we still have a standalone Photoworks and two featureworks licenses.
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