CAD Forum

My company is converting all our network drives from Windows file system on local servers into SharePoint drives. We have a team of 12 engineers who use a shared network location to access our Macros, Materials, Appearances, Templates, Sheet Formats, Blocks, Custom Properties, etc. I predict that SolidWorks is not going to be able to find these files anymore since it will expect typical file system paths which SharePoint doesn't seem to have.

One solution might be to move these files into the vault so that they will then have paths that begin with C:\PDM-Vault\... Is this a good idea. I assume that if it were, we'd all be doing this by default. We're not.

I keep all of that in PDM. It works fine. In addition, it gives you control over who can and can't modify documents / macros.

We have had all of the files you list except Appearances and Custom Properties in PDM vault since we started ~4 years ago. It does work nice to set up a category for them other than the default bin and regular CAD files, then give them a workflow. Our workflow just has two states, one where file can be checked out and one where they cannot be checked out. That gives a good place for permissions control. Can also set check out permissions by the folder and set the folder to get latest on login. Reason those files are excluded is we don't use them.

I've seen times when SW sets file locations back to defaults on people. I'm convinced it happens when the templates, for example, are not in local cache, then SW "helps" by changing path back to default install directory. I see this on new installs and people that clear their cache frequently (I do not encourage clearing cache). The files would be cached on login, but it seems if SW is started before user logs into vault view the files are not yet cached. I would think that the SW PDM Add-in would also follow the caching rules set up in Admin tool, but it doesn't seem to. We're still on 2019, maybe newer versions are better.

Also, PDM doesn't know any of those files to be special, and SW doesn't care about anything PDM outside what the add-in adds. So if a user tries to edit the material file, for example, they will need to manually go check out the file first. I forget every time and wind up redoing the changes. Would be nice if PDM Add-in supported checking that file out in process.