Summer is upon us and we had a great meeting on May 29, 2008 with 36 in attendance. I guess summer vacations haven’t kicked in that much yet … or maybe everyone is vacationing closer to home, or maybe it’s just the FREE food (that always brings out the engineers). Actually, we always look forward to the main event and this was no exception with Matt Rece, SolidWorks Territory Technical Manager, presenting on 3DVIA Composer (more on this later). Ricky Jordan made several announcements of interest to us all. The new revised NASWUG website www.naswug.com incorporates a BLOG format where anyone can now post comments. Also check out the NASWUG website to get more info on a RSS feed that Ricky mentioned. SolidWorks 2009 Beta program kicks off in early June and anyone that is on a SolidWorks subscription is eligible to participate. Go to the SolidWorks customer portal website. And in case you haven’t heard, SolidWorks purchased CircuitWorks recently and it is now included with your SolidWorks Office Premium subscription. You can download and install it now but it will be fully integrated into Office Premium with the SP4.0 release.

We had a short nominating process, actually self nominating process, to establish the new NASWUG officers. Congratulations to Ricky Jordan, continues as President, Rich Hall – new Vice President, yours truly Michael Langley – continues as First Secretary, Jim Clyburn – new Second Secretary. For our NASWUG-RSA group, Gary Hall continues as President. Also established is a new NASWUG Advisory Board, consisting of the NASWUG officers and two NASWUG members. We still have one member position open, so anyone willing to help out contact Ricky Jordan (ricky@naswug.com) The Advisory board will meet once every two months independently of the NASWUG meetings to discuss meeting topics and ways to improve the User Group.

A little more about the main event. Matt Rece presented on 3DVIA Composer, a new offering from SolidWorks. 3DVIA Composer is a product documentation solution that allows your organization to create 2D and 3D images and animations for technical publications, assembly instructions, marketing presentations, and other customer materials If your company has such documentation requirements, this is a go to package that improves these outputs and is highly dynamic. To make changes in your documentation images and animations you only need to update the CAD from which the images and animations were created. 3DVIA Sync, a separate component, integrates 3DVIA Composer with a full range of CAD systems, so you can automatically synchronize and schedule updates to BOMs and other types of data. There are other 3DVIA Composer add-on products as well as a free 3DVIA Player that allows 3DVIA content creators to distribute 3DVIA Composer content to any end-user. Many thanks to Matt for an excellent presentation.

And finally, thanks to Terry Ray and Tom Young from ModernTech for joining us for this meeting. It is always good to see reps from the VARs. The next meeting will be near the end of June at Redstone Arsenal (watch your email and the NASWUG website for the announcement). It is now easier than ever to RSVP for the meetings and this really helps us out in planning for the free food.