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5 Gentle Steps to Team Collaboration in SolidWorks

Published
by
Josh
on November 28, 2007
in SolidWorks Tips
.

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gophers.jpg

Getting through a project in a multi-user environment is one of the greatest challenges an engineering company can face.

There’s this PDM and that PDM, this process and that process, and it quickly turns into a community of gopher-heads popping up to have each other check stuff in ‘real quick’ while schedules dwindle into the pasty thin atmosphere of successful ventures.

Shake off the sad face, there’s hope yet.
Fortunately, SolidWorks has some options that make collaboration much easier. But where do you start? How do you set up a multi-user environment? Here’s how to keep the peeps in their seats and the music bumpin’ for a fully collaborated machine of a team.

Now don’t get offended if this is over simplified. Hopefully it is. Work environments are different, so take the steps and adapt them to your situation.

Set up roles
Ok, first step. Who’s doing what. This can be used for 1 to 27 people. 28 are just too many. Really the numbers don’t matter, but roles will help define tasks and it’s always good to have some checks in place. This can be as complicated as you like, but here’s a simple 3-part approach.

Manager – Schedule tasks, deal with emotional people
Lead – Check data, coordinate the collaboration, hugs
Peons – Design and update, the grunt work, follow commands

This is mostly to capture a process rather than set-up a organizational structure. If you’re a consultant, you may be all these things wrapped up in a single streamlined operation. If you are, even better, these three roles turn into that process to help organize your workflow.

Keep files on central server with read-only Access
This is about as important as you can get. You don’t want something to change accidentally. It’s common sense yeah, but a lot of times, and especially when SolidWorks is first being implemented, people will save models on their hard drive - makes it kinda hard for people to work together with everything on your hard-drive. That’s ok for testing but it’s an even more important reason to have a good implementation plan.

Create a Central Workspace on the Server with Read-Write Access
Pretty Basic. This is the spot everyone works from. Files are moved from the secure area to the work area. The Lead can take on this task to make sure everything stays safe. He would need that super-powered administrative access to move files in and out though.

While I typically do not recommend working off a server, in a team situation this may be more convenient. If you’re concerned about working on large assemblies, I would add an additional step to set-up syncing files to your local drive. If your PDM doesn’t do this, you can use SyncBack to load files faster and make a mirror of your server files on your local drive.

Set-up some simple Task Management
You can do this through Outlook. In the Navigation Pane, there’s a Task Section. The manager can throw tasks out on a whim to the team and watch the progress with updates.

some simple delegation can go a long way. John does this assembly, Jim does that one, Jane works in the main assembly, Jack get the coffee brewin’… you get the idea.

Set Collaboration Options
Ok now the SolidWorks part. You may have seen these options and pondered long drives to somewhere far away. However, these simple check boxes are the magic beans behind the scene.

You’ll want to set these options to take advantage of how SolidWorks can control file permissions for your team and keep everyone working with the most recent data.

  • External References
    Can you see that top one there? Its Open reference documents with read-only access. You definitely want this checked when everyone is working out of the same location on different items.
    swx-external-ref.jpg
  • Collaboration
    This is the collaboration section. It’s down at the bottom in System Options. I have all the boxes checked. The first activates the multi-user options. The second adds a menu item so when you right click a file you’ll see an option to either Make Read-Only or Get Write Access. Say you’re working in an assembly and need to add a notch to a part. Right-click on it in the Feature Manager and select Get Write Access. Now you can make your change, right-click again and set it back to read-only.The last checkbox to check for changes to read-only files is optional, but good to use when there’s lots of changes happening. You can set it to check every minute up to every hour.
    swx-collab.jpg

This can help you gently ease into a collaborative work-environment. Do you think there are other things that help multi-user environments?

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Viewing 14 Comments

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    Josh,

    You provide excellent advice for group file management. I implement the same settings for every day use for all our SolidWorks seats. Whether you have PDMWorks or another PLM tool matters not, (you mentioned gopher heads...thoughts of my childhood playing Whac-a-mole entered my mind). Something to add; communication, communication and communication. Users on the project team need to let the other players know where there at, if they experience problems, or when they plan to complete certain tasks. Did I say communication yet? Thanks Josh...I need to go give someone a hug now! ;~)

    ________________________________________

    Edson Gebo | Mechanical Designer/Detailer
    Linemaster Switch Corporation | 860.974.1000 x-215
    29 Plaine Hill Road, P.O. Box 238, Woodstock, CT.
    Co-Chair of the CMNC-SWUG
    • ^
    • v
    Hey Ed. you're not kidding about communication are ya :) It's true though. I think we practice mis-communication more than communication sometimes. not to efficient. maybe more hugs??
    • ^
    • v
    Josh,

    Placing files on the network undermines a big benefit of PDM/PLM which is improved performance. PDM and PLM tools usually work with a local cache and when you download/checkout files from the server, the PDM/PLM tool only brings down the files that are different. This means that most of the files are loaded locally versus from a network (either LAN or WAN) and this almost always yields a significant performance improvement over the shared network location method. Working for a reseller of SolidWorks and PDM/PLM tools, I get the opportunity to see many customer sites and it is rare that I see networks that don't have latency/bandwidth issues that yield a considerably slower file open time than a local file open operation.

    One customer that I remember vividly was complaining of performance issues so I went and gave them a visit. They had a really, really large assembly of a facility that they said took 47 minutes to open. We noticed that they were opening over a network so we asked them to open locally and it took 7 minutes (not as long as it sounds if you saw the assembly). We convinced them that they needed a PLM tool so they purchased one and then proceeded to set up their "local cache" on the same network location : (

    Go figure.

    If you are deadset on using the Network settings, though, then you got all the options correct. File, Reload is also worth mentioning when discussing collaboration too.
    • ^
    • v
    • ^
    • v
    We use PDMWorks Workgroups and have most of these suggestions in place. We download the models to the local workstation hard drive from the PDM vault.

    When reading the article, my first thought about using a centralized network cache was that network traffic/bandwidth might be an issue. Jeff, thanks for your comments on that subject.

    We have fairly new workstations, but our network is a little dated. It is still a 10/100 based system. Gigabit networking with a managed switch and large packets is still 6 months to 1 year out for us.

    When we check something out of the vault, it has to travel over the network to the workstations. Our vault is on one physical server (server02) and our general share area is on another physical server (server12). From an organizational view, we would like to put the network cache area on server12 - all the users have permissions for the share area. But does that mean moving the data over the network twice - PDM Vault on server02 to network cache on server 12, then file manipulation between cache/server12 and the individual workstations?

    Moving the network cache to server02 would remove one of the network transfers. But what advantage would I see over our current setup? The PDM software already keeps track of who is doing what updates. I understand that the network cache ensures each user is updated with the latest, but that can be accomplished with work practices of checking for updates from the vault.

    Now it is your turn to tell me what I am missing.

    Thanks for your help.

    -dch
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    One more vote for Communication. That gets me/us into more trouble than anything else (miscommunication, that is. See I'm mis-communicating what I want to communicate. I'm going to stop now...)
    • ^
    • v
    Daen, Hi. If your network traffic is an issue, you could Sync to your local drives. I'm not sure how PDMWorks handles this though. Jeff would know more about it. Personally, I use Syncback to get my files locally and reduce network traffic. You may also want to make sure that mail and print servers are separate from your Vault and Share Server.

    If hardcore team collaboration is needed, I would suggest having a server specifically with that. Again, easy to do with something like Syncback, but may have to approach it differently with a Vault-based PDM system like PDMWorks.

    Any tips Jeff?
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks Guys,

    Here is a little additional info about our particular setup:

    We have four seats of SolidWorks.

    Our licenses are served from a server that contains the license servers for all our products and the PDMWorks Vault.

    We have a large disk array mounted to another server that acts as our Share area.

    We have additional physical servers dedicated to Mail, DNS/Gateways/Internet, phone, security, etc.

    So we really only have two servers that interact with our CAD efforts - the license / vault server and the share area server. Those two machines don't do much else.

    We develop flight simulators for the government. Our models currently have 600-700 unique parts and toolbox parts on top of that.

    PDMWorks manages ownership and currency of each file. It works well enough for our operation.

    Each user checks out what they need to their local hard drive and then checks it back in to the vault when done. If user A saves changes to the copy on his hard drive, the Vault monitors that and lets all the other users know that they are not working with the current version.

    We do have multiple copies on the verious workstations hard drives, but the Vault software takes care of the communications part.

    I am just wondering if I move all of this to a common network cache area if I am trading in the multple copies (not currently a workflow problem) for reduced performance due to the additional network loads.

    Thanks again for your thoughts.

    -dch
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    I would say anytime you are having to move files across servers, its going to reduce your performance. The companies I've worked at with vault systems and one's I've set up with Smarteam have just used one server for the vault. No shared server unless there's a satellite office where a replicated server would be set up. Your shared server seems to be acting kind of like that and seems unnecessary since you're all in one location. I don't see why that share couldn't be on the vault server as well, since you're still working locally.

    Do you handle your own IT or contract it? You may want to discuss a more robust system for handling large data transfers. speed, distributed file systems (DFS), defragmentation and maintenance, local file sync, battery back-ups, sql database are just some of the things we've had to discuss with when using SolidWorks.
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks Josh,

    You have pretty much confirmed my questions.

    Our current practices do not move model files to and from the share area. The transfer is directly from the vault to the local hard drive. The share area does contain the shared SolidWorks data - toolbox, templates, library parts. Again, it any of these items are needed, they are transfered directly from the share to the local hard drive.

    Your indications are that eliminating the working files on the local hard drives in leu of a single common place on the network would slow performance due to the additional network traffic. That was my "gut feel" but wanted it confirmed. Thanks.

    We do our own in-house IT so modifications to the system are an option.

    Thanks everyone for your input on the subject.

    -dch
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    I've read this post twice, checked all the settings on the two seats we have and I cannot open a file if the other designer has it. He does not have write access to it so what gives?

    We keep all our files on a network that gets backed up every night to tape. Would syncback make life easier? We certainly have the slow loading issues, we share the toolbox on the network, I read somewhere that was a good idea.....is it crap?
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    Hey MikeO. If you have the 'open reference...read only...' option checked. you won't be able edit it until you right-click, select Get Write Access.

    It's a good idea to have all your controlled files on a protected network location. It's not a good idea to read a lot of file data across the network. That's what's gonna slow stuff down. I think you would definitely benefit from SyncBack or equivalent to get a copy of your files on your local drive so your models load faster. We have it set up to sync every night and we can sync manually whenever we need to.

    Disk space on my local drive hasn't been a problem. (Only 40GB of SolidWorks files on a 100GB drive in the past 4 years) and you can archive when necessary. It does require regular defragmentation, but that should be a regular activity anyway.
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks Josh but I may not have stated it clearly.

    Engineer 1 will have the assy (read only) open and when I try to open a subset it will tell me it cannot find the file?
    • ^
    • v
    seems like it may be loosing the reference. I'm not sure why it would not find the file otherwise. I'll usually mirror the files on my local drive with the network drive, so if I loose a reference all I have to do is change to drive letter.

    hope this helps!
 

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