It would shock me to learn that now there are ONLY two development teams.
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I’m sure there are different teams for products as well, especially the ones they purchased like simulation, PDM, Manage, etc.
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We actually have found we get better answers here than our VAR ever provided. Glad to be off of Subscription service.
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The majority of times I’ve bothered to contact my VAR, it proved to be a waste of time. At best I got an SPR or ER, which remains open / ignored. At worst I got a work around with no apparent reporting to the mother ship. It only took a few of those incidents to realize I got better support here, and didn’t need to waste my time with official channels. The exception to this is a couple of times I’ve had PDM license/connectivity issues that they were able to resolve.
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Most of the people here are older and have been using SolidWorks and/or 3d CAD for many years, nearly 30 years myself. For new users I’m sure the VAR is adequate for most basic questions and dealing with some issues, really depends on who you get. But if you get some 25 year old fresh out of college, who has all the certifications that SolidWorks offers. Sure, he/she may be able to operate the hell out of SolidWorks, but couldn’t tell you when to use a sketch fillet vs a feature fillet.
Now we just @matt to tell us how with SyncTech a fillet is just a fillet, sketches be damned. 
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Blockquote Now we just @matt to tell us how with SyncTech a fillet is just a fillet, sketches be damned.
It’s not fair to bait me like that. Actually, I use ordered fillets even in Synchronous. But you can change imported fillets. Sketch fillets are usually a bad bet.
I can’t help myself, even when I see it coming.
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I’m hard pressed to disagree with any of the VAR sentiment here.
Unfortunately, DSS has allowed the VAR’s to consolidate, which has had a deliterious effect on the level of support provided.
Like most, my requests for support were either ignored, or minimalized with no real benefit to me, the subscription payer.
The VAR’s have separated the commercial end from the technical end and the technicians now have no skin in the money process, so they simply don’t care.
My relationship with SolidWorks goes back to the days when VAR’s were a small group of folks who where financially incentivized to solve their customers problems.
Unfortunately, like a lot of other tech, DSS is the latest in the headlong movement towards enshittification.
Cheers
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I wasn’t expecting that. Ok,…I gotta know…why?
If the number of edges change on a synch part, synch fillets won’t update, but ordered ones will. The other things that I do ordered on synch models are sketch text - because - can you imagine making those changes with synch? and the other one is sometimes the shell features work out better with ordered, but you can still do synch shells.
The interesting part would be writing company modeling standard rules for ST vs ordered and when to use each.
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… and both together.
It’s likely we would have started to incorporate some hybrid approach had we stayed with SE. But like you pointed out; agreeing upon, maintaining, and policing company modeling standard is tough enough with old fashioned ordered modeling. ST really is a whole new world of modeling methods. As Matt hinted at, learning the behavior of ST during edits throughout the life of the part and how they affect assembly relationships and drawing annotations is very important to have good, stable models.
Seems if you have models that go through frequent updates, they would degrade over time as users start to destroy ordered features to make edits the feature doesn’t like.
I think you’re missing the point. What would you do in SW? You’d hope the “Delete Face” genie works today or you’d rebuild a section of the model. In SE you’re just inconvenienced by not being able to do it the “academically perfect” way. Synch gives you so much more capability with imported data.
Well, that can happen in ordered mode (SW included) with direct editing as Matt pointed out. We have a couple of users that will use offset or move face(s) to change a hole diam or location instead of editing the sketch. It bothers me, but they learned that from another life of 3D CAD use and… Anyway, it all points to the need for an agreed upon set of best practices for the department, ordered or synch or both. The ideal is using synch where it works best and ordered where it works best, in one model. Not so much making edits by plopping new synch features on top of otherwise robust ordered bodies.
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No question on editing imported data. I’m just trying to wrap my head around how to properly implement best practises for a mix of Sync and Ordered since you mentioned it. This being the case where we are modeling from scratch so “Delete face” doesn’t really enter the picture.
Maybe this convo belongs in the Solid Edge category.
I had a co-worker like that. If I had to touch one of his parts I planned on spending at least half of a day rebuilding it. There would be 20 or more features like that, so not only was the history tree massive, you had no idea what to change to get the desired outcome.
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try every sketch being on the main planes, and being off set from those planes and related to another sketch. and hole wizards that when you edit the sketch there to move a hole that is fully defined with no dimensions. I eventually recreated the model to work off a few skeleton sketches to control some planes and put all the sketches where one would expect to see them on said planes to make editing easier. Along with renaming all the sketches so that if you look at them you have an idea of what they are there for.
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That’s part of the curse of history - you don’t get any benefit from the history, but you do pay a price for it. Your sketches aren’t history-based, why should the rest of the model be? What if the whole 3d model reacted to change the way the sketch does? You don’t worry about who came first in the sketch. You shouldn’t worry in the model either, because there’s no benefit. We’ve just been brainwashed for the last 30 years that this is the right way to do it.
And best practice? It becomes much simpler if you don’t have to worry about history, or only have to worry about it in limited situations.
To answer the best practice question, though, the synch part of the model always comes first, and the history part comes second. So if you update the synch part, the history part will update to match.
Synch modeling doesn’t have much best practice. With synch, as long as the model is right, no one cares how you got there. There are some methods which are more successful than others, but that’s more in the line of basic training.
This is still kind of relevant to subscription. Because the underlying question is “should we ditch subscription and/or solidworks”. Solidworks is easy to use, but in the end, it tends to lead you down the wrong path and leave you without proper tools. Lack of real direct modeling is one example. Configurations are another. External references are another.
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Whats more frustrating? This ^ , or one of your user’s deciding to “override” dimensions so they can just type the desired value.. 
When I caught several discrepancies on a part I was programming for production and confronted him about it, he seemed incredulous.. like .. so I can’t do that??
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Yep, I think synch-tech was created for people that model this way. If the user lacks understanding of how history based modeling works, just remove the history components and always work with dumb solids. That’s just my perception, I have very little understanding of how Sych bodies actually work.
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