Day 1 started off like last year, it resembled a rock show! The production that goes into the morning sessions is amazing to me. Breakfast was served from 7am, and they opened the doors to the general session area at about 8:15. At 8:30 the show began.
Jeff Ray started out the morning talking about what has happened to SW since last years conference. SW has surpassed the $300 million sales mark for the first time ever. They are now estimating that there are over 600,000 users worldwide now! He also showed a study that was conducted of online search engines. When you do a search for companies looking for a 3D cad operator, 33% are looking for SW users, the other 67% is being fought for by 7 companies, giving each of them less than 10% average! So it looks as if us as SW users are becomming more and more valuable!
The conference itself is boasting 150 break out training sessions, and has an attendance of over 3500 people. They didnt make as big of a deal out of attendance like they did last year, so I wonder if it didnt meet their early expectations?
Jeff ray then introduce an Army Corps of Engineers Col that was in charge of the rebuilding of the flood control system here in N.O. after Katrina. While the topic seemend a bit more for public relations, as opposed to dealing with SW directly, the Col did talk about Design With Vision which is the theme for the week.
In keeping with the 'green earth' theme they then had an MIT student on stage that spoke about their challenge to make eco friendly cars. SW is sponsoring the program with free software, so they get another pat on the back I guess. This presentation did allow for the oppurtunity to have one of the vehicles driven up on stage, and who better to do it, than John McEleny!
John spoke about the theme of the week, and showed us all some pretty cool stuff. Most inpressive was certainly the saw that would cut wood, but not your finger. I will try to get some info and post it later. After that he introduced us to Solidworks Labs. Its some cool new web based free stuff. Full info can be found at: labs.solidworks.com (leave off the www, for some reason that was the only way I was able to get to it).
After that, he gave us an early taste of whats new in 2008 and the main part was definately the new User Interface. The interface looks very nice. But more than just pretty stuff, he showed us the ability to stretch lengths and widths of bodies, and how to change a extruded round boss into a countersink!
A new large assembly tool now allows a use to open up a large assembly, in much faster, less memory hogging fashion! Live Preview allows for certain parts of an assembly to be opened, but still hav full functionality before deciding to open the rest of the parts. As part of the new User Interface, tabed browsing (ala firefox) will be new. DFMXpress will be a new tool that will check a finished model for machinability I.E. it will point out that sharp corner pockets will be hard to machine on a conventional mill.
Overall it looks pretty good, and there is a lot of buzz around what we will see on Wed morning. Johns words were "incredibly exciting".
After the morning session I was off to a hand-on session on configs with Gopal Shenoy. Also in the room was the guy that wrote the orginal config part of the software. Thats the best part of SW World, the people that write the software, are here, and they love to talk shop.
Anyhow, that the morning session for day 1 in New Orleans. Now its off to three afternoon sessions, then the CSWP event tonight! I cant wait to see what they have planned!
I also want to appoligize for any spelling errors, I would go back thru and proof it, but the line here at the internet kiosk is growing by the minute!
Stay tuned for SW World Day 1 wrap up!!
Mike