Subscription services - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now throughout these videos you probably recall me mentioning subscription services. So I feel like this is a good point to just dip into what exactly subscription services are. I feel like there's some confusion out there about what's actually offered and what you get. So for a lot of customers, subscription services really just focus around getting their new version downloads and installs so they can keep current on the software. But for what you pay for subscription services all year, you get a lot more than that. And I feel like you should really try to take advantage of that. So let's take a look at the SolidWorks website really quick. And just see what they throw up here for subscription services. So of course they mention the top priority. New software releases and upgrades. You also get your local technical support. So when you have issues you can reach out and have a certified SolidWorks professional give you a hand. You also for Pro and Premium licenses get SolidWorks Visualize standard. So for those of you out here who do renderings and you're working on marketing material or presentation material or just wanna make a really nice looking image of a design that you've worked on SolidWorks is slowly shifting away from the PhotoView package. I don't believe they're gonna be upgrading that anymore. They're moving completely into the Visualize rendering package. Which is actually pretty easy to use and pretty user friendly and makes some very, very impressive images without too much fuss or muss. And seems to work a lot smoother than PhotoView which can be kind of buggy because it requires so much power. Additionally you get access to CSWP and CSWA exams. So you get access to two advanced exams per year for every seat of SolidWorks. And that's for everyone at your organization. So it's not like I've got two people in the office who have a seat of SolidWorks. Well if you have four users, you can get them all certified. So work with the certification team. They often offer all kinds of special discounts and rates. And if you go to any of the user group meetings where they're presenting, they'll often hand out vouchers. They really want to get you certified and this is just another offer that they're giving you to become certified for free because you have subscription services. There's also access to mysolidworks.com Which has all kinds of information related to Solidworks on it. It connects to the SolidWorks forums, some of their videos on some of the specific parts of SolidWorks, and also other downloads and things like that. It's kind of a location where they're trying to group everything from SolidWorks together at one spot. And also newly in 2018, we now have access to SolidWorks Cam Standard for standard, professional, and premium licenses that are on subscription services. So now you also get a free cam package on top of your 3D CAD package because you have subscription services. So it's not from what I understand a full blown five access CAD package, but the professional version I believe will do that or the premium version of SolidWorks Cam will give you that. But if you need to do simple 2D kind of milling operations, routing operations, or other simpler Cam or you can piece it together using the code that you produce here it could be a great option for reducing your costs in other parts of your department by having this Cam available. Also there's the SolidWorks customer portal. That's where you can kind of run everything related to your SolidWorks subscription. So I'm gonna jump over to that really quick. Here you can see, you get access to the SolidWorks knowledge base which has thousands and thousands of reports on solved issues with SolidWorks. So if you've run into it before, it's likely that someone else has had an issue. And you can just simply look here and do basically a Google search of SolidWorks issues and find your answer most of the time. And there's also the ability to give enhancement requests. Most of the features that are in SolidWorks come from enhancement requests. They don't simply start making a new part of the software because they think people are gonna want it. They listen to their customers and say these are the things that people want on our software and then that's what we're gonna roll out. It might not always happen as promptly as the customer would like. We want everything right away. But they do their best. And compared to some of the other companies out there, it's pretty speedy. You'll see roll outs of new features within a year or two sometimes that are pretty complex. I know specifically right now, there's a lot of advancement in the mesh tools area. Which is pretty awesome. So going through the rest of these, we have a bunch of other areas. But I just wanna focus mostly on the downloads and updates area. This is where you're gonna be able to get access to all those other versions of SolidWorks that you wanna download. So if you're on 2018, you can get all your 2018 downloads here. Your 2017 downloads, 16 or 15. And usually they support back about three to four years depending on what time it is in the year. You also have more references, access to the CAD admin dashboard which we'll talk about later, and then things like connections to the forums, the user groups, SolidWorks World, and then again that certification link. You also have as part of your subscription services the ability to download custom attributes and appearances for PhotoView 360. So if you're not using Visualize yet and you're not comfortable with it. You haven't done the proper training that you feel like you're gonna use it full time, you can go in here and download a bunch of custom properties that are mostly user made but they're really great appearances that work in PhotoView. And you can do things like add carpet or very elaborate textures to surfaces pretty easily and really jazz up those renderings so to speak. So you can see subscription services really gives you a lot for what you're paying for it. So if you do have it and you are paying for it, definitely leverage all these different things that come with it.