I used QA00000125380_1_List_CAD_BOMs_With_Wrong_Workflow.sql and it returned the same files I looked up manually with my queries.
I inquired my VAR about the above QA and I asked if it could be used in its second part with SW 2023 too, since it was written as a ‘workaround for Solidworks PDM prior to 2021’.
My VAR seemed quite pissed off, and today the sales representative phoned me asking for a meeting with my boss. Apparently my inquiries are taking too much of their time and it is too much an hassle to manage them, because the technical level they require is quite high and demanding for their standards.
My guess is that they probably calculated how many hours it takes to answer my questions in a year and likely come to the conclusion that our annual maintenance fees, including the additional “PDM advanced support” (paid separately) is not enough to cover my requests…so they basically hinted me at MORE MONEY in the form of a separate consulting: basically we should pay them to solve the same mess they allowed to be built in the first place in our PDM in a decade. If I had to judge from what I am seeing inside our DB, Vault and the state of our datacards and workflows I would fire them on spot.
At some point their “consultant” was even suggesting practices that in the KB are explicitly said to be deprecated. (like using cold storage for version control purposes…)
So we decided to cut their consulting (about 15% of our annual budget for SW, PDM and simulation combined) and keep only the SW support (CAD, PDM and additional advanced support for both that costs us the equivalent of two additional license fees).
Since I can read decently at least three languages, I think that I can manage to solve more than 90% of the issues, but for the remaining 10% I need to go directly to DS devs or to some very skilled and experienced professional that understand what is behind a SW KB article and have a bit of real world experience and use the VAR system.
To be clear: VAR support is decent, even if it takes days to answer, I am not complaining about it at all. I usually get my answer (which I do not like in most cases)