There’s nothing like spending a Saturday trying to figure out what the real issues are (compared to what SW says on screen) when doing a server migration and upgrade of SOLIDWORKS/PDM/SOLIDWORKS Electrical from 2017 SP5 to 2025 SP5. The biggest offenders:
The archive server spammed the SQL server trying to login with bad credentials and caused the ‘sa’ SQL account to get locked out
The archive server upgrade tool complained about an incorrect password when the real issue was that the user login wasn’t set up with ‘attach access’
I guess that’s what happens when circumstances lead to a 8 year gap between upgrades.
That’s been one of my arguments for upgrading annually which I did for 12 years for PDM and 20 years with Solidworks. Easier to digest one year’s issues and differences and training than several years all at once.
Then we aligned globally on products and Solidworks and moved to Windchill. We jumped from Solidworks 2019 to 2023, only waiting that long due to the difficultly upgrading Windchill across 7 different countries. And each country still has legacy products to plan around, like we do in PDM. No telling when we upgrade next, maybe to 2026 in a year or so.
I can’t wait to drop 8 years worth of What’s New PDFs on my users. I did go through and highlight the stuff that is relevant to our usage. A large portion of my time for the next couple months is going to be answering ‘How do I’ questions.
Can’t imagine an 8-year gap, especially if still paying for those new versions. Guess that’s why vendors are trying to push folks to cloud hosted apps… they can force the new stuff on you continuously!