DriveWorks 7: The Wait is Over!
Currently available as a Technology Preview to a limited audience, DriveWorks 7 is slated for General Availability to the entire DriveWorks community by the end of February, 2010. Scratch that, DriveWorks 7 was released Friday, February 26th and is now generally available. The new version includes a redesigned architecture that provides a new lightning-fast rules engine, customizable specification flow, enhanced web capabilities, and full support for interactive updates within SolidWorks sessions.
Some of the new functionality was leaked out in late 2009 with the release of DriveWorks Solo. The changes in the way that DriveWorks functions under the hood are significant and may have a large impact on existing implementations as DriveWorks moves away from the use of Microsoft Excel as its computation engine.
You can also expect some new product names. With the introduction of DriveWorks Solo, DriveWorks Engineer is now called DriveWorks Pro. The DriveWorks Model Generation Server is slated to be renamed DriveWorks AutoPilot, and DriveWorks Live will now be known as…well, DriveWorks Live. For more information or if you have a specific question, please contact us. If you want a more detailed view into DriveWorks 7, read our article on DriveWorks 7 details and sign up for Razorleaf’s online DriveWorks 7 Update Training session.
Tags: Design Automation, DriveWorks, DriveWorks 7, DriveWorks AutoPilot, DriveWorks Engineer, DriveWorks Pro, DriveWorks Solo, Microsoft Excel, SolidWorks
Read more posts by Paul Gimbel
February 25th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Hi,
I’m just wondering how easy the switch between DW 6 and DW 7 will be. The removal of Microsoft Excel as the computation engine afraid me.
Have you try the upgrade of projects from DW 6 to DW7?
Thanks for the feedback.
Alex
February 26th, 2010 at 8:11 am
How difficult is migrating a group/project from DW6 to DW7? Excellent question, Alex.
I first need to reiterate that DW7 DOES support Excel-based projects for legacy purposes. So moving to DW7 does NOT immediately mean that you need to get off of Excel. (And we have been assured that support for Excel will remain until such time as DriveWorks can guarantee that all projects can be brought over without any loss in fidelity.) You should see performance boosts even if you move to DW7 and don’t move off of Excel. DriveWorks provides a tool that migrates a DriveWorks 6 group and projects over to DriveWorks 7. In the technology preview, we have had pretty good results with that tool. Not 100%, but pretty good.
Now moving off of Excel is another issue. And the difficulty there all depends upon your level of customization. I believe that DriveWorks is going to release a tool to move Excel-based projects over somewhat automatically, but we have not had a chance to preview that. We’re willing to bet, though, that if you have custom VBA code, internal documents, and/or extraneous calculation worksheets within your design master, there will be some manual conversions involved.
And yes, of course, this is a service that we provide.
March 5th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
Not to mention that VBA and .NET are different animals. There is a good chance that the way something was done in Excel VBA is not the same way you would do it in .NET. With the .NET Framework at your disposal there are new methods and functions available. Re-writing might not be necessary but it may be desirable.