Store & Revise

Getting Started with Storage

With Cloud Services, storing your designs becomes the simplest part of your day—and we’re going to walk you through exactly how.

Configuring Your Platform Storage

Set up your secure cloud storage solution and understand the platform management dashboard in this quick start guide. We’ll cover:

A Reminder on Collaborative Spaces

Collaborative Spaces play a pivotal role in unlocking the power of Cloud Services, providing you a secure vault to store all of your files and invaluable control over who can access them. In this video, we’ll walk you through:

Using Bookmarks

3DEXPERIENCE utilizes a different approach to organizing content than the more-common Microsoft-like folder structure. Our storage structure is based around searching and filtering using attributes. SOLIDWORKS content is stored in a collaborative space, which is a “flat” structure. Using Bookmarks in combination with the Bookmarks Editor app enables a folder-style view of your content.

The Basics of Cloud Storage

Let’s start with the basics—including how to save, find, and open your designs without leaving the SOLIDWORKS platform. Here are some of the screens and actions you should look out for.

Best Practices for Storing Parts and Assembly Files

Our recommended strategy for parts and assemblies designed and developed in house for production is to save one physical product per part and assembly file.

For existing SOLIDWORKS customers that are adopting 3DEXPERIENCE, it’s important to understand how configurations have been used in your parts and assembly files before saving any of these files to 3DEXPERIENCE. Due to their versatility, it’s common practice for design teams to treat configurations as individual part numbers. If this has been your organization’s approach, and your intention is to maintain any part or assembly configurations as individually lifecycled engineering items, then those configurations must be split off into their own individual part and assembly files, each containing one physical product configuration only.

How to Open a File and Make a Change

Now that we know how to save files, let’s see how to open one and make a change. In this video, we’ll show you how to:

Getting Started with Revisions

You’ve got the basics on cloud storage, but what about revisions? Learn how to capture your design history with out-of-the-box revision management, right from your SOLIDWORKS user interface.

What Do Cloud Revisions Look Like?

You have a part model open, it’s already been saved in 3DEXPERIENCE, but you decide a change is needed. This video takes a hypothetical view at your ability to revise designs using Cloud Services, including:

When You Might Use Revisions in 3DEXPERIENCE

There are many reasons a company might revise their products—including technological advancements, market demand, and competition. Revisions help companies track the changes to a product, along with its history.

Example: A company releases and manufactures revision A of a part and sells the part to a customer. Then, because of a new technological breakthrough, the company modifies the part and releases revision B. However, the service department still needs access to revision A to support maintenance because this version is already in the market.

Capturing revisions also helps a company duplicate, modify, and build new products from existing designs, reducing some of the costs associated with building new prototypes. Revisions also provide valuable insights that help companies understand the design evolution process, aiding the future development of improved designs.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a robust mechanism to manage revisions that is easy to set up and maintain. Key features include the selection of alpha or numeric revisions, control of visibility based on the revision status and enhanced search.

Primary Revisions vs Secondary Revisions

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides for primary and secondary revisions. Primary revisions are used by companies that have simple data management requirements or are working on a new major release of an object. Secondary revisions should be used for minor updates and new iterations of an object between each major release.

Recommended Platform Settings for Working with Primary Revisions

Settings controlling the revision schema and behavior are located in the Collaborative Spaces Configuration Center. If you are adopting the use of primary revisions only, we recommend you use the following settings:

Recommended Platform Settings for Revisions

If you are adopting the use of both primary and secondary revisions, the following settings are recommended:

A Reminder on Lifecycle & Revision Control

As the maturity state of any given object, lifecycle lets people know what their status is within a business process—helping determine who can have access to the object and what kinds of actions they can perform on it.