- [Male Instructor] Throughout this course,
you'll notice that we rely on the
administration tool on SolidWorks PDM
to perform a lot of the settings, tweaks,
user and group definitions, data card edits.
This is really the hub for all of
the settings and components that drives SolidWorks PDM.
What doesn't directly control your
files or your files' structures,
it is what's using the background
to control everything else.
Really quick, we're going to run through
all of the different parts of the
SolidWorks administration tool and in future videos,
we're going to go into specifics for some of these actions.
I will note if you're using SolidWorks PDM standard,
some of the options that we see here
in the SolidWorks PDM administration tool
are not going to be available to you.
For example, templates are not included
to be controlled by SolidWorks standard.
You have to do it the old fashion way
using SolidWorks templates workflow.
Let's jump into the admin tool and take a look.
You'll notice when I come in,
I haven't accessed any vaults specifically yet.
I also haven't logged in at all.
While we're doing this activity,
we're going to follow along using the
SolidWorks network license administrator
to see how many seats of SolidWorks PDM we take up
because there's an interesting situation
that arises when you use the SolidWorks administration tool.
I'm going to go ahead and double click
on Dave's Vault here, log in.
If I go over here and refresh, it'll take just a moment,
but you're going to notice that one of
our license is going to be taken.
We'll just give that minute to update while we go through.
Also, we'll notice down below
that I'm not logged in on this machine.
I've only logged into the admin tool.
If I want to, I can also log in on this machine
and that gives me access to the Windows explorer
and all the other components that
we discussed throughout the course.
I'm going to pull up in the license manager again
and sometimes it does take a minute or two.
I've noticed on this network it is
taking a minute to register.
We'll come back to that in a second.
We're going to focus on all of the
different things we find so far.
Let's start at the top, add-ins.
These are a lot of the macros and
custom programs that you can add in
your SolidWorks PDM admin tool to do various kinds of tasks.
We talk about dispatch in another video which
is used most briefly to just take
files that exist and do some kind of mass activity to them.
That might be change a part name,
change a prefix or a suffix,
change a part of the description,
maybe copy a file tree and move it
over somewhere else using a dispatch.
There's all kinds of activities you can use with dispatch.
It's just one of the many add-ins that's available.
You can go online onto the SolidWorks forums
and other venues and find custom add-ins
that you can download and just add-in right here.
We also have controls for a bill of materials.
We have custom bonds, weldment bonds, weldment cut list.
If you get into very specific activities
where you want to create custom bonds
for let's say a list of hardware,
a list of sheet metal components in an assembly,
or various other things, this can all be done here.
You simply create a new bill of materials
and go through all of the steps
that are required to define that bill of materials,
which is basically making a new column
and linking various variables and attributes to it.
If we go down a little bit farther,
we touch on a card section.
On the data cards part of this video course,
we go into the data card editor and various data cards.
Long story short, this is where you can
check the status of what data cards
are being controlled by what documents and vice versa.
Folder cards, all of our folders also have cards.
You can edit them here as well.
They're also items, search cards for your custom searches,
and a template for making various cards.
Moving down, here we see categories.
These are the various categories that we see
in SolidWorks PDM in the interface.
We have cold storage schemes.
We're not going to worry about that right now.
We don't touch upon cold storage in this course.
We have columns for creating various views.
You can see here that this is for
the default view in your data card.
Here you can customize many other columns
and the views in the PDM.
You can control things like groups.
You can put your users in various groups.
It's not very hard.
You simply open it up and add group members.
You can see here I've added a group
of engineers to my engineering group.
You also have licenses.
If you need to add a custom license file
or check on the status of your license,
you can just double click on that.
You can see here that we're using
the server network license so it's referring to that server.
You see if I go into the network license administrator,
that's now populated as well.
Sometimes you have to wait a minute for this to refresh
and then it comes through but,
if you do go to access another license
when it's maxed out it will warn you immediately.
Pay attention to this if you're
doing a lot of admin work and
bouncing around a bunch of computers.
You can eat up your licenses pretty quickly.
Moving on down the list we have various lists for cards,
the messaging system, replication if you're
going to try to replicate a vault and that
means basically copying an archive
and a database and moving it to another location.
We can control here how revisions are done.
We're using an alpha revision component.
Using letters can change that to a numeric revision
or add other schemes as well.
Here we can create custom serial numbers.
We're going to do a video just on
creating these custom serial numbers
and walking through that process.
Scheduled tasks, you can automate your task list.
Let's say at the end of the evening,
you want to make sure that at 5 o'clock every night
every engineer in the company has
all of their parts checked in and a new version created.
You can automate activities like that here
or other things like automatically
generating PDFs at a certain time, various tasks.
Also as I mentioned before,
we have the ability to control temples through PDM.
Using this we can set up some custom templates
and once they're linked as a template
in the SolidWorks PDM system,
you'll see them start to populate in here.
We can control toolbox, we can also add users
and manage all of our users here.
Just an example, we'll jump into the admin user profile.
You can see here we've got general properties,
you can fill this in and have a lot of
information about users if you're
sharing it across a large network,
what groups the members are in,
what administrative privileges they have,
what privileges they have to access folders
or do activities in specific folders.
For the admin as you can see,
a lot of the permissions are already engaged.
Let's say that you want to give
access to members to only certain folders.
You can select certain folders in the vault
and then start taking away permissions or reassigning them.
It really gives you the ability to kind of
hide and show and give access to
different parts of the vault using this.
There's state permissions as well
when moving through our workflows.
Transition permissions,
which relate to the workflows as well.
Permissions per file,
sometimes we create specific permissions just for files.
The search cards, which we mentioned again,
you can limit who has access to
what kind of search once you make those templates.
Same with the bill of materials,
the tasks, and the other templates.
You can see right now because this is just a test case,
we don't have any templates or
tasks put in there right now.
There's also a section here where
we can adjust what kind of warnings come to you.
Let's say that you're new to SolidWorks PDM
and you want to have the warnings stepping you through.
You can turn those all on.
Because I've been doing this for awhile,
I usually keep these off 'cause they tend to slow me down.
I know when things are rebuilt or not rebuilt
just by being able to look at them in the feature tree.
I know when it's checked out just
by looking up at the top and seeing
if I have the read-only version.
If you're new and you want to keep track of those,
turn some of these warnings on.
You can run into situations where let's say for example,
you're working on a part.
You do a bunch of edits but you
had it in read-only mode and you
go to check it in and somebody else
has already checked out that part,
made similar or different edits,
and they have possession now.
That's going to limit your ability
to roll the edits that you did
into the file vault, into your part,
and then create that history using
the versions and revisions.
There's also cache options.
As you open parts in SolidWorks PDM,
they are deposited into your local cache.
Let's say for example you open up a 10GB assembly
and set them all at resolved,
check them all in, check them all out,
SolidWorks is going to put a local copy
of those parts on your machine
to increase your productivity and
make it so that you don't have to
ping the serv every time.
You're only going to be pinging the server
when you do operations like checking in
and checking out or getting the latest version
or getting a different version.
With this, let's say that you finished
a large project but you're working on
something like a mobile workstation.
I actually travel around the country
and the world with a Surface Pro Three.
That runs out of space pretty easily
because I didn't get the extended drive.
What I'll have to do is after working
on a bunch of these projects and
building up on my hard drive all
of this space that comes from all these files,
you can after clear these caches.
I will warn you, if you clear caches
without paying attention,
you can delete work that you've done
before it's been checked in.
You want to make sure that all of
the current work that you're on is checked in,
it's been verified that it's on the
server location in the most recent version or revision
before you do any kind of cache clearing.
Eventually over time you will have to clear your caches.
Here you can set automatic options so that
when you finish at the end of the day and you log out,
you can clear out your cache,
or maybe when you log in it'll
refresh your cache and pull up all of those files
so that you have the latest versions.
There's a couple ways to do that
if you're working on a specific
file set and you want to automate this,
sometimes it's a good idea but not always the best.
Be careful about this because you
can very easily delete your work
before you get it checked in into the vault.
We also have an option here to copy trees.
If you want to copy a tree being a file structure
for a certain assembly or group of parts,
you can do that as well and move
them over to a different area in the vault.
You can also set passwords here,
send mail messages through the system
and adjust other settings like
what kind of files can be added,
what you can do with checking in and checking out,
how your explorer interface comes up.
Things like languages, how messages are handled,
and also toolbars and viewers.
We're not going to save any changes here.
We're going to move down.
Just a couple things left in our admin tools.
We have the variables.
If we expand this here we can see
all of the various variables that
already exist in our system.
In another video we're going to go
through editing and making custom variables
using the administration tool.
We also have workflows below that.
We've talked about workflows a little bit,
but this is where you go in to
edit these workflows as you push
items through them to get approval
or push them into automated processes like
generating PDFs once they've reached a certain rev or
pushing out to another location
on the servers so that an assembler
or a fabricator can see a copy
of a drawing after it's been approved.
You'll also notice,
now that we've gone through everything in this vault,
we also have the same access to all the other vaults.
All of that replicates for every vault that's in our system.
That was just at quick run through
of the administration tool.
There's a lot more to it, certainly,
and you can do a lot of things with it.
The main point with this tool is
this is the main driver for all
of the settings and all of the customization
that exists inside of SolidWorks.
You can use this administration tool
from any system where you've got PDM installed.
You don't have to be on your server
doing this kind of work.
You can be on one of your user's machines.
Find an error or find a permission
that shouldn't be existing,
go in, make that change right there.
Just close it and it'll update
to all of the other clients and the main servers.
It's a very flexible and powerful tool.
We'll be using it throughout all of these videos.