Hi everyone.  I regret to inform you that we will not have a NASWUG-RSA meeting for the month of August.  We have run into some scheduling conflicts with the meeting facilities and won’t be able to get the meeting in this month.  NASWUG-RSA WILL be meeting (FOR SURE) in October.  We should have a date and location announced soon.  Stay tuned for a meeting announcement soon for the September 2008 NASWUG meeting.  I can guarantee you it will be sometime after September 22nd because I don’t get back from Disney World until then!  🙂

Starting tonight I have begun the changeover process to switch server providers for this site.  Over the next 72 hours you may experience disruptions in accessing this site as the new name servers propagate across the internet.   IF YOU ARE SEEING THIS POST, then you are looking at the site on the new host.

E-mails to anyone with an @naswug address could be limited for the next couple of days as well.

Don’t worry!  Everything including the Forum will be kept in the changeover.  I’ll let you know when everything is fully back online.

Our NASWUG RSA meeting took place at the Redstone Arsenal on June 24, 2008 with 17 in attendance. Looks like summer has kicked in fully with schools out now. A few minor hiccups were weathered while waiting for the food to arrive. Pizzas were a little late … something about an oven breaking down, and a cable issue required some scrambling to get Gary Hall’s laptop to display via the projector. Nothing that everyone couldn’t handle though. After the food arrived Ricky Jordan began the meeting with the announcements and general questions. A few people raised their hands in response to “who is participating in the SW2009 Beta test?” SW2009 Beta1 is available to anyone on a current SolidWorks subscription. Someone asked about running SolidWorks on Vista. It turns out that Microsoft has begun to phase out the Windows XP operating system, BUT they have also said they will continue to provide support until 2014. And SW2008 SP4.0 is available at the SolidWorks Customer Portal. Ricky mentioned the newly integrated CircuitWorks which is included for anyone with an Office Premium seat. If you upgrade to SW2008 SP4 (Office Premium seats) you will automatically have CircuitWorks. It is not a separate download. We still need one NASWUG member to complete the NASWUG Advisory Board. AS mentioned at the last meeting, 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.

Gary Hall presented on the subject Templates. The presentation touched on several aspects of Solidworks templates (Dwg, Part, Assy). Templates defaults were covered along with where the files were and could be stored. Answering questions about templates was part of the presentation such as, “Can a design table be stored inside of a SW template”. Doing a multi-sheet drawing template was presented. The difference between a drawing format and a template was covered. Other templates were discussed such as BOM, Hole Table, Rev Table, etc… Lastly, a quick demo of 3Dawn.com’s Template Wizard was discussed. This is a relatively inexpensive tool (discovered at SolidWorks World 2008) that can make creating templates a less painful process. Thanks for a great presentation, Gary.

Concluding the meeting the names of Bhisham Lall, Ledwin Mercury, Drew Riley, Patrick Nickel and Gerald Tuck were drawn for door prizes (to be picked up at next meeting). Again, due to a minor hiccup, the usual enough door prizes for everyone did not arrive on time. The next meeting topic has not been confirmed yet but there were several expressions of interest in a presentation on CircuitWorks. If you have any ideas or requests for topics be sure and forward them to ricky@naswug.com

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.

Congratulations to the 2008-2009 NASWUG Officers

President – Ricky Jordan (incumbant)

Vice President – Rich Hall

First Secretary – Michael Langley (incumbant)

Second Secretary – Jim Clyburn

Any members interested in the NASWUG Advisory Board needs to e-mail me (ricky@naswug.com) ASAP.  I only have one taker so far which leaves one spot open.

We will have a complete write up of the last meeting posted soon!

Here are a few additional items that we will be discussing during the May 2008 meeting this Thursday.

Officer Elections

We will be holding Officer Elections during the meeting.  We are going to try and make the process simple and fast.  Four positions will be up for election.  President, Vice-President, First Secretary, and Second Secretary.  The meeting floor will be open to nominations from attendees.  A member CAN nominate themselves for one of the four positions.  If more than one person is nominated for a particular position, the winner will be determined via online voting.  I am working on a list of “duties” for each position and will post them before the meeting on Thursday.  We will also be implementing a NASWUG Advisory Board.  I’ll have more on that later as well.

Stay tuned to the NASWUG site for all the latest news!