My recent experience with the DSS

SOLIDWORKS SW General
1

I thought I would recount last weeks interaction with the mess that is DSS / Solidworks / 3DX.

Last week we purchased a term license of solidworks Professional for a contractor that is going to be working with me for a few months. I called my VAR, got a quote, submitted a PO and received the license.

In the email with the new license was an introductory letter that included the following:

" Your company has recently purchased SOLIDWORKS software and we are here to help you get started. TriMech has created a 3DEXPERIENCE Dashboard allowing you to access your serial numbers, software downloads and technical support all in one location. To access your serial numbers you will need to first activate your 3DEXPERIENCE Software using this link"

I spent a bit of time struggling through their website. I found the area where you are supposed to manage subscriptions and it kept giving me an error message:

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After more emails, adding higher levels of support at trimech, being given more and more admin roles on 3dx, I was finally told “This license is managed through your VAR, not online.”

Great. That would have been good to know in the original email, not after wasting a bunch of my (and Trimech’s) time.

Problem #2.
Last year we purchased a couple of makers licenses for some summer interns to do the basic tutorials. 1 year later and these licenses auto-renew. OK. Shame on me for not staying on top of this. I just need to eat this $48 and go turn off the autorenew. The only problem is that I cannot find anywhere to manage these subsciptions. I know I purchased them using my company credentials, but they don’t appear anywhere in my account, at least not that I can find.

I call my VAR and was told “we don’t have anything to do with online licenses.” I tried filing a couple of support requests in the swamp, but those wen’t unanswered. (Searching online, that seems to be the default for educational/makers licenses. No support, even for billing issues.) The only recourse left was to contact the credit card company to stop payment.

On top of all of that, I kept having to read a “recaptcha” screen that is so distorted I can only figure out the text about 20% of the time.

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2

Just another day at Dassault unfortunately…

If you haven’t found out how to manage your licence, ask on the Makers Support ‘forum’ on the platform, Kairan should point you in the right direction.

3

Was that email from your VAR or DSS?

4

It was from my VAR. (Trimech) It is pretty clear, in hindsight, that the semi-auto generated email is all about the swamp, and had nothing to do with the license I purchased.

" Hi Scott,

My name is X, and I’m one of the engineers at TriMech. I called you earlier to discuss your new licensing, and your entitlements associated with it. If you have an opportunity to call me back (X), we can go through some of the new features with your licensing. Additionally, if you have questions or concerns about your licensing or the installation process, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Your New SOLIDWORKS Software License

Your company has recently purchased SOLIDWORKS software and we are here to help you get started. TriMech has created a 3DEXPERIENCE Dashboard allowing you to access your serial numbers, software downloads and technical support all in one location. To access your serial numbers you will need to first activate your 3DEXPERIENCE Software using this link. Create a username and password if needed.

Tenant Link: …

Now that the software is activated, please use this link to load your Home Dashboard. This will provide the ability to access your serial numbers and download your software.

…
SOLIDWORKS Resources

If you have any technical questions please contact our support team.

Best,

5

It is Amex’ problem now.

Even if I knew how to find the Maker’s forum, I don’t have any desire to be in the swamp.

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I tried anyway. Here’s what Kairan can do.

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7

It has been over a week, and we still don’t have the licenses we need for our contractor. I’m pretty sure that is the VAR, but it is all the same BS to me.

8

So the VAR doesn’t know how to get the license to you either?

9

I blame Dassault more than the VAR. We bought additional licenses of SolidWorks and DraftSight a year or so ago and it seemed a struggle because they had to go through a new system and it was apparent it wasn’t ready for primetime. I could sense the VARs frustration.

10

I just got an email claiming they only activate licenses when a customer requests. Why would I ask for a license but not want it activated? The whole thing feels like I’m telling them how to provide me with what I need for the license they sold me.

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11

You would think they would just include the SolidWorks Pro serial and the PDM Standard serial that comes with it. I guess they don’t want to generate license serials for the PDM part since most people that buy SWX Pro aren’t using PDM. However, in your case, they knew exactly what you wanted.

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I am putting it down to incompetence, but it is probably more of an incompetent system than an incompetent person.

The conversation with the sales agent began with trying to get a license for PDM standard. The contractor has a SW license, so we only needed to add PDM. They don’t sell standalone PDM standard licenses, so the cheapest option was to purchase a seat of Solidworks professional.

Clearly once a sale is generated, the system goes into autopilot.

The system sent me an email saying “go here to manage your licenses.” Not only is that not where the license is managed, they didn’t send me the license. We resolved that problem after a couple of escalations.

Next I realize they haven’t sent me a PDM license. When I request one, they send me the license but they don’t activate it. I think some of this is because “everyone is in training” so someone unqualified is trying to help.

This is probably what customer service looks like in 2025, but that doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed and disgruntled.

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13

I can speak for professional, but pdm licenses are binded to the PDM server as they are exclusively accessed on demand for that server.

I can say that if you want to cancel a PDM license later, they do not have a clue how to do it apparently.

If you go out of maintenance with some of your licenses (not all of them) those SW the license are converted from SNL to standalone.

For PDM there is not a standalone format as the license is managed by the PDM server and it makes sense when you connect to that server alone.
I suspect DS is going to re-issue a new SN and invalidate the old one, but I hope to be wrong.
They can indeed add new pdm licenses to a SN, but not the reverse??

14

We dropped some SNL SolidWorks licenses and they issued us a separate serial for the dropped ones and reduced the count on the primary serial. Technically the cancelled licenses are still usable on SNL up to the year version of SolidWorks available at time of cancel. Once we upgrade we can nno longer use the new version on the old license counts on the 2nd serial, however, I could in theory give them to some downstream groups that do their own thing and don’t have to worry about future version issues since they don’t use our models.

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my main concern is that I have a deployed all our seats with an admin image binded to a sn.
while for pdm is going to be server side, how does it work for the dropped workstations?
I mean, is the sn issued for the new installation and you could just use the old sn up to the latest supported version you had before dropping maintenance?

16

The SNL is a license count, you can install as many individual clients as you want and point them to that server. Actually, the shared serial number installed on the client doesn’t really seem to be as relevant as how the clients are configured to the SNL server.

For example, we have US users that install from an image thats uses our local serial number. However we have both a Global license server and a local license server (long story). The users can get a license from either server, it just defaults to the first in the list, then when they run out goes to the next server. There is a global serial number but the users aren’t configured to it.

So say you have 20 licenses. You might have 50 clients installed sharing them. Then you drop maintenance on 10 for 2023. You now have two serial numbers, the first one with 10 licenses under maintenance, and a second number with 10 not on maintenance. If your users are on 2023, they can still use the 20 license total. Once you upgrade to a version the drop licenses don’t cover, your users will only be able to use 10 total.

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VAR (not DS) told us the new serial dropped out becomes node locked, it does not make sense in my head.

If there were 2 serial numbers under snl it sounds a more reasonable approach, but as i was told it does not seem the case with us and managing a plethora of node locked workstations is not going to be fun.

18

Unless they handle it differently in Japan, or the policy changed in the last two years :man_shrugging:

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About the forceful node locked conversion it sounds so crazy I hope is a VAR miscomunication issue.

The sn in the admin image is used to validate the install, but a node locked activation sn behaves differently as it allow to bypass the snl program even if installed in the machine.
we have a node locked simulation machine that behaves like that, I could switch the sn to our network license with the registry hack, after deactivating the node locked SN, but I do not think using both sn is possible. I hope to be wrong.

20

If i remember right, the serial number input during install determines SNL or not. Our SNL begins with 0010 however newer SNL seem to be 9010. Our standalone numbers begin with 9000 although we have an older one that begins with 0000. Maybe other countries are different.

After install, you can change the number in the registry, there are several keys under local machine to edit. I had to convert a bunch of automation servers from network to standalone doing this.

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SolidWorks\Licenses\Serial Numbers
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SolidWorks\Security
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\SolidWorks\Licenses\Serial Numbers
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\SolidWorks\Security

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