I wrote something you guys might enjoy 
37 things that confuse me about 3DEXPERIENCE: https://cadbooster.com/37-things-that-confuse-me-about-3dexperience/
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I appreciate your efforts. But if you think this is getting fixed, you are mistaken. If it has got this bad and this far… there ain’t no way ANYONE in that company has the brains (nor the power) nor the morals, to fix it.
IMO, its straight to the scene of the accident (only in super slow motion because they have far to much real monopoly money [from lockin]).
I didn’t admin the system, but as an end user I didn’t have any issues once I learned the button pushes. DDM managed Creo, SW & ACAD files and was used to initiated, signoff & approve ECNs. It wasn’t connected to the ERP system.
I had an problem (can’t remember what it was) that the admin didn’t know how to fix but DDM responded within a day.
Grateful for the submissions and opinions from some of the community with far greater weight than I…
SW User since 2005, currently working on 2022. Used some Pro/E, NX over the years, but 90% SW for a variety of solid, surface, assembly, engineering drawing & simulation tasks for a variety of clients in a variety of industries.
Used 3Dx for one client for a year or two - overall a pretty horrible experience; the software just didn’t feel anywhere near finished. Trying to map metadata from part/drw files through the cloud was a complete nightmare. Often assembly check-ins would fail half-way through for no reason, losing data / saving half the flies etc… creating a mess to unpick. If you’re a massive company with hundreds of seats, you’ll get SW and/or VAR attention to fix some of these problems, and probably quickly. If you’re a small/medium sized user, forget it. Going on everything I’ve heard coming out of SW from the last few years there’s too much ego invested in 3Dx and the ‘swmp’ for them to admit they’ve got it wrong and to wind back. Shame.
One of my main clients now runs Standard SW PDM and it works fine. Took a while to setup and optimise workflows (which has to be done on a live project really, to flush out all the real-life oddities) but now is pretty slick and with an on-site server is fast and reliable.
A previous client used this, and no way would I consider it again. We experienced massive issues and had to switch PDM systems back to what was being used before mid-project. It may have been tweaked over the last few years but in my opinion the problems were so fundamental I have low confidence they could be resolved in any reasonable time frame.
Looking back broadly over the whole industry, it’s interesting to look at what drives it - money. SW had a glory period where it sold loads of seats, taking market share from PTC, Autodesk etc… and made loads of dosh. This drove development and made the good bits of SW that we all appreciate, but (like smart phones) the improvements at each release generally got less and less useful as the software reaches a point of convergence, (I guess similar to most others). Would I choose to use SW2015 over SW2005? Absolutely. Would it make much difference if I was now using SW2016? Not massively. Sure there’d be a few things, but nowhere near enough to justify 8 years of subscription fees. Sorry to sound cynical, but it just feels like they’ve realised they can’t continue to make money at the same rate they used to so have looked at alternatives; unfortunately this feels like they’ve let the marketing department take over with a overall goal of owning your own data, and holding you to ransom to use it. If this had been implemented in a slick and rigorously-tested way they might have succeeded, but you’ve only got to spend a few minutes on the ‘new’ forum to realise this hasn’t happened.
No empire lasts forever I guess.
My take is that IT went too far hand in hand with finance: short cycles with high returns.
Manufacturing is the opposite. People need reliable goods. Imagine your car or appliance maker stopping business in one year to make other stuff.
In our company there is also who think to go back to 2D. at least you can develop with less cost than 3d, but use double the amount of designers and drafters as the software, its maintence, the hardware and the var cost as much as a multiple person salaries.
IT and finance think they can leverage everything they control, but if we had to do the same they would not be able to afford food anymore, and a simple chair is going to cost like a plane to develop and produce.
Started on SW98+ after several years of drawing board then AutoCAD 12/14. I pestered management for ages to get hold of SW and they finally caved in after receiving a quote for Pro/E. Have mostly used SW since then with short periods of Pro/E, Inventor, Fusion, NX and Rhino, working initially as an employee, then as a freelancer. Work has been across a broad spectrum, from wire & cable to test and measurement, then into industrial design and back into engineering.
I have whinged a lot over the years about SolidWork’s flakiness to colleagues and on various forums, but it has served me well and I can usually get what I need done, perhaps with the odd workaround or two. I have always recommended SW to others looking for a system, usually with a few caveats, but now find myself in the position where I am looking again at a new system for a startup I am involved with.
I stopped paying maintenance a while back as I didn’t see much return, either in new features with each release, or from support from the VAR (they’re not at all bad, I generally don’t need it). I am stuck on SW2022 but using 2018 on the current project as it is far more stable and quicker on my machine than later versions, a view shared by the other designer I work with (started on SW97).
We should be receiving another round of funding in the next quarter. One of the tasks scheduled is the purchase of seats of a shiny new system for the growing mechanical design team and we are scratching our heads over which way to jump. What would once have been a simple decision has been complicated by the shenanigans with 3DExperience. Our ambitions are large so we want something that can scale effectively as the organisation grows. We have trialled NX, which we like but balked a bit at the cost, we don’t like Inventor particularly and I think Creo is unlikely. There’s a lack of enthusiasm for Onshape and we have another designer who has used it and hates it.
I work remotely most of the time so I like the potential of the cloud but almost everything I read suggests 3DExperience is a bit of a clusterf### and I can’t escape the feeling that DS is busy trying to kill its golden-egg laying goose.
What to do?
Only just saw it. Point after point I’m nodding my head. So between the Dutch matter of fact view and a Belgian no nonsense view we both agree that the powers that be have really no clue who there customers are.
And I think that what’s worse, they don’t seem to care.
Everything you wrote about 3Dexperience I fully agree with and lots of those things I mentioned myself years ago. I too question what the use is of having a Logo that you have to explain what it means and who in their right mind thinks that having a logo that needs detailed explanation is the way to go.
Or why that there are all kinds of different web addy’s that are all related to the same product and that you have to log in individually and with tighter security that SCIF Top Secret documents? Or why you create a forum that needs a expletive delete manual to navigate?
Been using SW since '09 and as some of you know, I have had issues that took a decade to be addressed. Not solved mind you, addressed. I have had issues that to this day are still not solved and it had to do with a basic functionality in the add on that we have to pay Premium for. Promised to be solved doesn’t cut it anymore because while it worked as need be in a certain SP, it broke the very next SP. And then it worked again, after me kicking some shins, and … again stopped in the next version or next SP.
Touché mate, Touché.
Yea, it’s a French problem LOL
Still reading the post. Glad I didn’t try to use Maker.
I spent hours creating a document describing the same problems after the company I was working for evaluated the product for something like 6 months, two years ago.
It was the same problems plus another 50, maybe. They responded quite fast on technical bugs I described but the problem was structural, as you pointed.
I understand their business model to have a lot of options in their product to modulate their offering but we don’t have to see this. I don’t want to use 10 different tools to accomplish one task. By the time I arrange a workspace with the needed apps and the needed views in each of them, I don’t remember what I was aiming for…
The example I was often using to demonstrate that nonsense to their managers enquiring why I wasn’t happy with 3DX: there’s a bunch of options somewhere that let you choose your preferences for the railway signage standard… WTF!!!
I just stumbled on this response. Thought it worth linking.
https://www.onshape.com/en/blog/design-easier-with-cloud-native-cad
As much as I think Onshape is doing cloud right, I will defend 3dx in this case and just say that comparing Onshape’s PDM/Data management to 3Dx (Enovia) PLM is no comparison. The functionality is not even close. Of course, if you can’t navigate and find what you need, maybe the point is moot.
Well, that indicates that they are active within CAD communities, which is more then can be said about the upper management of SolidWorks unfortunately. Writing that article about a month after an article about 37 things Dassault got wrong was posted here is quite the coincidence I’d say.
Agreed. I read that was the point of the response, to highlight the differences and those are why one is working an the other has more functionality. Their differences is what makes Onshape appealing. 3DEXPERIENCE has way more functionality, potentially. But there’s so many barriers to the functionality that it doesn’t matter if it’s there or not. Better off having something simple that works.
You know companies though, they want the sky and the big players cater to delivering every conceivable function you could ever ask for. It’s just going to cost you more than you realize and it has to be general enough that it likely won’t excel at it.
SolidWorks PDM, has served us well, however we have far outgrown it. We have customized what it lacks to a high level. We almost programmed and implemented a Part/BOM function similar to the abandon “Item” function. At what point is the commercial program we bought still there if we built so much on top of it? Sure Windchill has this capability OOTB, costs a lot and we are still customizing it and need a team of developers and support.
For a mid size to large company with a complex product that has a long life on the market, I almost feel it may be better to just in house develop a PLM system instead of trying to shoehorn it into some of the commercial products.
It’s like a company using SolidWorks for doing house plans, you can, but why?
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My usage is practically all top-down modelling and I use a lot of multi-body parts. Exclusively Weldments, sheetmetal and extrudes, (maybe a few direct editing features.) for welded frames, laser-cut & folded plates and machined components in the transport engineering field.
I am a one-man show here so I set the standards and make all my own rules regarding literally everything about how the models are constructed.
I make all my own output files for pre-process suppliers and drawings for fabricators
Aside from some fundamentals training, mostly self taught with hard won lessons (from this forum and the old one) along the way.
I started in 2014 And the few small changes to those core functions are so few that I could literally keep using v2014 Ad-Infinitum.
I am, and have been, wholly unimpressed by the neverending stream of supposed additional features.
I would only consider updating now if they actually implement a bunch of my enhacement requests, or demonstrate significant improvement to stability.
I have only ever updated for specific reasons. To liaise with customers/collaborators on later versions, or to hopefully fix the bugs any updates brought in.
I will not use the cloud. My oldest version (2014) still runs on WIn10 and I understand that it will work on WIn11 too when that time comes.
And of course I have a perpetual desktop license for the current 2014 [EDIT] “2024” version I am using now. I assume that will see me thru to retirement.
Speaking of the cloud… Is anyone here actually using it for their daily drive.
(I see some scary stories on the Swm regarding access/connectivity, etc.)
Same here. Great, isn’t it?
Yes… Those reasons are good, and it is great to not be reliant/dependent upon, or responsible for others.
It is also good knowing that when it all goes right, as it usually does, it’s all me.
And No… I sometimes feel poorer for the lack of other colleagues wisdom and experience to learn from, or work with.
(Is it technically a brainstorm session when there is only one brain involved..?!)
Occasionally I feel a lack of comradery like I had working shoulder-to-shoulder with the other boilermakers in my tradie days.
Plus, with noone else here doing what I do, noone really understands the challenges. Or shares the workload (or blame 
).
The flip side to that is when a couple of years down the road you realize one of your decisions was a poor one. With all of the credit, comes all of the blame.
That’s what I use this forum for.