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Reading this morning a reply from Adrian got me to thinking about when I made the move from VX, now ZW3D, to SE and how it seems CAD companies put roadblocks in the way of CAD users who contemplate leaving.

In my discussions with other users  before leaving VX that was the big problem then and now and indeed always has been. How to move all your legacy stuff without gobs of headaches.

Leaving was for me a two step process in that first I had to get mad enough at long term unsolved problems to consider leaving and then the process of wading through all the information online and the sales spiels and the  “WE have the best stuff tailor made for you” sales litanies.

Even though VX licensed the Parasolid kernal from Siemens as indeed many other companies do how they implement it is another story. Even into their current 2011 beta for instance imports from SE into ZW results in cylinders  broken into segments. Instead of having just one 360 degree face I would end up with three most of the time. One would usually be 180 degrees, the next 179 and the last would be tiny at 1 degree or less and if you did not learn to catch these things it would ruin your day in a cam plan. Sadly these segments would be what I got back into SE from VX on a number of occasions to. Since Siemens writes the parasolid kernal you can suspect whom I thought to be the one doing it right.

So whether deliberatly done to make translations or switching to another program difficult or just an effort to differentiate  how the product will work the end result is the same for users. A heap of trouble.

Transmagic is a company that has a translator function I have never tried but it has interested me for some time. It is a batch translator where supposedly you can translate a number of files at one time. It seems to be a great idea and I would like to hear from someone who has used this especially in the area of assemblies and how well the data comes through.

It would also seem to me that it would be a great tool for a cad company to author  in house to offer to those who are contemplating switching to their product to ease the pain of doing so.

If you were fed up with your current CAD vendor just how much more likely would you or your company be to switch to a different product if you knew a competent batch translator was available in the new program?

 Matt Lombard is responsible for my entry into the blog world although he does not know this yet. I have watched and posted a number of times on his blog but never bit the bullet to do my own.

  So I found myself yesterday wanting to post a video of how I edit a real part in SE  on his blog and one thing leads to another and the culmination of this was a decision to just go ahead and dive in myself.

  When it’s your blog you get to do and say things you don’t feel you can say otherwise because being reasonably polite on some one elses turf is just the proper way to behave. And since Solid Edge is my program of choice it behooves me to just start blabbering about it primarily on my own site.

   I don’t however intend to limit the topics to just Solid Edge as it is only part of my business life and many of you know I am quite  opinionated on other topics like [ughhh!] the Cloud.  CAD and CAM in general is of interest to me across the board irrespective of who authors it so there will be comments on other products here too.

   I own and run a small job shop and I wear all hats from design to sanitary pipe welding to cnc machining and clean ups on aisle 3 so you just never know what may show up here.

  One of the things I would like to do with other SE users is real parts and how they were done and why. I figure to learn  in this blog from others who are better than I am or just have a different approach  and put this information out there for other users and those just curious about how my tool set compares to theirs. I don’t try to represent myself as a Solid Edge expert because I am not. But it is what I use to make a living and I intend to share what I know with others.

  I believe with my own money that SE ST3 is the best MCAD program out there right now enough to desire to help the SE community along with this blog and wellcome whosoever will to join me.

                                                                     Regards, Dave Ault