CAD admin tool - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Narrator] When working with SolidWorks installations and maintenance another powerful tool to use is the CAD Admin Dashboard. So, the first thing that I want to mention is to leverage this tool you're gonna wanna go to all your seats of SolidWorks that you're gonna monitor. And that's what this tool is for. Go to the options and make sure that right here where it says help make SolidWorks products better automatically you've got that turned on. Turn on the SolidWorks Customer Experience Improvement Program. While this sounds like something that's gonna be bogging down your machines, sending information to SolidWorks all the time, it doesn't, it just every once in awhile sends your current log file in, which is a small text file, and then sends out an output so you can monitor and see what the current system status is, make sure that everything's working right, you're not throwing any errors. So let's go ahead and click okay. I'm now gonna go over to my web browser and you can see I'm logged in to the SolidWorks customer portal here. And I'm gonna go ahead and click on CAD Admin Dashboard. Now, this dashboard is set up for my company, so I've got some different things going on here. But the first thing you wanna notice is down here below we've got different year versions. So, take a look and see. To begin with I've got my account, my serial, a baseline, what driver I'm using, benchmark information, session details, notes, comments, when it was updated, and what service pack it's on, all for this version. So, if I switch that to 2017 it's gonna update that page and you can see that I've got a lot more information available because in my office I have many users that are using SolidWorks 2017, that's our base package. So, what this does is give me the ability to go through and monitor all of my fellow users and make sure that if they need driver updates we can do driver updates. What service packs they're all on in case people need to be updated. You can see here that some people are on service pack five, and some are on service pack three. That's due to issues that we had in our office, and while I do have some errors and other things throwing up, I know what's going on in my system, so I'm not worried about it. I just use this as additional information if I'm missing something. And you can see I can also expand and see who's using what hardware on every single setup, so for each different machine we've got all of the hardware that they're using. I can see things like, okay, this user, Mr. Sinclair, has only seven gigabytes free on his hard drive. So we probably need to give him another hard drive so he has more free space to be able to do his work a little bit easier. I can look at my PC right here and see that I've got an ASUS machine with 16 gigs, a Quadro video card, and I've got almost 250 gigabytes free space, so I'm probably set up pretty well, but I still want to upgrade my 2018 service pack too, so I've got a note there for it. So there's all kinds of options here, you can filter accounts, you can manage groups, you can delete accounts, you can export this, like I said you can switch between different year versions. And down below for each machine that you're selected on you can also get additional information down below on the processor and specifics that aren't listed above, my Rx benchmark, which I haven't done yet, and also session details from my last session when I was operating SolidWorks there. So you can see it's a very powerful tool. It gives you the ability to really monitor all your SolidWorks seats, because sometimes you're not using a network license or you don't have access to all the machines all the time, you need to know what service pack people are using, what version they're using in case you're having issues inside your company or while you're working on your own. So, remember to always use the SolidWorks CAD Admin Dashboard if you have subscription services.