Lou Gallo runs a popular podcast called SolidWorks HEARD that provides 10 to 15 minute audio shows on tips, tricks, tutorials and tech news on all things SolidWorks. This week's show is dedicated to a review of the SolidWorks add-in for Workbench and spoiler alert: he likes it!
Originally posted by Lou Gallo on solidworksheard.com:
This podcast covers the updates and new add-in for SolidWorks for the evolving GrabCAD engineering platform. Every year when I come back to revisit what GrabCAD is up to, I am amazed at their expanding offerings to the engineering community. Topics covered:
- An overview of GrabCAD Workbench
- The GrabCAD Workbench web UI
- Overview of the SolidWorks Add-In
- Use cases and workflow from within SolidWorks
- SolidWorks format support and integration with GrabCAD web service
- Overview of pricing plans and capabilities
- Overall thoughts
Workbench was focused to tackle sharing and collaborating on private 3D data and provide browser-based viewing (WebGL), markup, measure and comment threads around design teams and their data. A year ago I covered the newly launched Workbench and at that time it was primarily a web service, requiring upload of data via the web and somewhat disconnecting the CAD authoring tool from the collaboration service.
With the launch of their SolidWorks add-in, GrabCAD has narrowed the barrier between desktop and cloud, allowing Workbench to become an in-process tool as well. Versioning, file locking and auto sync with upload/download support give light PDM to any SolidWorks user. I'm excited to see what else the folks at GradCAD will do next!
~Lou
