SolidWorks World 2010 (Day 4) – General Session

The last general session had a quite a few interesting things, one of which was the announcement of the Top Ten Enhancements list. This is public wish list created by users where they can vote on on wishes submitted by other users as well. Here it is.

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Like all other CAD vendors, SolidWorks like to say that they listen to their customers. I found it interesting to see that number 3 was “file compatibility between versions”. Earlier in my interview with Shaun Murphy, the Product Manager of the code SolidWorks product, he admitted that backward version incompatiblity was a business problem and not a technical one. So this implies that SolidWorks can do it. It will be interesting to see if SolidWorks listens to their customers on this one.

The enhancements that will be in SolidWorks 2011 were shown during the Super CAD Smack Down which was punctuated by cheering from the audience as they were shown some cool new stuff like planar simulation, piping enhancements, walkthroughs, lightweight welds and a bunch of other stuff.

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There is now going to be something called SolidWorks PLM with an offering called SolidWorks Product Data Sharing. By the end of this year, SolidWorks users will be able to share their data in the cloud using the Enovia V6 backbone. We were shown a demo of that on stage.