Working at home with SOLIDWORKS PDM

Mar 17, 2020 | 0 comments

With the sudden increase in COVID-19 cases from few hundreds to few thousands in short span of time, our Prime Minister has declared the entire country will be on a movement control order starting from March 18 to 31.

You may feel like this action may result in inconvenience to your daily routine, especially when you need to work from home as it can be challenging to manage your data where it is mostly hosted in your company offices. With SOLIDWORKS tools, there are many things that can be done to make the transition easier. Here are some tips on how you can work while at home:

1. SOLIDWORKS Licensing – Standalone License

A standalone license allows you to activate SOLIDWORKS on one machine. Just deactivate your current install (office PC/laptops) and activate your alternative install by launching SOLIDWORKS on that new machine and following the activation prompts that appear. If you are unable to access your work computer to deactivate, contact our technical support and we can do remotely for you!

2. SOLIDWORKS Licensing – Network License

If you are using home computer and your company owns a network license, it allows you to access SOLIDWORKS in 2 ways:

  • Use a VPN connection to connect to your company’s license server

Make sure that you had set up VPN (Virtual Private Network) access to your company’s server and you are able to access to SOLIDNetwork License Server and use SOLIDWORKS the same way as you are in office. 

  • Borrow license to local machine

If you are unable to access the server, then you can borrow the SOLIDWORKS license from the SolidNetwork License Manager.

Borrowing a license:

STEP 1: Open SOLIDNetwork License Manager and choose to the tab ‘License Borrowing’.

STEP 2: You will need to set the duration, with maximum of 30days of the borrowing period.

STEP 3: Select the available licenses to be borrowed/required then click on Borrow.

STEP 4: Click Refresh, and the Expire Date will indicates when the license is due.

STEP 5: Click OK.

Returning a borrowed license:

Any borrowed licenses will not be available in the network pool until it is returned. If you are back in office before the return date, you can manually return the license by doing these simple steps:

STEP 1: Open SOLIDNetwork License Manager and choose to the tab ‘License Borrowing’.

STEP 2: Select the product to return.

STEP 3: Click on Return.

3. SOLIDWORKS PDM

If you want to syncronise your design data across your entire enterprise, SOLIDWORKS PDM is the right software for you! SOLIDWORKS PDM allows you to share the right information, at the right time to the right people. PDM also helps you to manage your data files and documentation and enables you and your teams to securely store and index design data for fast retrieval, eliminate concerns over version control and data loss, and collaborate on designs anywhere in multiple locations. 

If you are a SOLIDWORKS PDM user and planning to take your PC or laptop home to work remotely, there are few things you will want to consider:

Just like in SOLIDWORKS Licensing, you will need to set up your VPN of which there are many possible solutions, both Hardware and Software based in order to access a “PDM Vault” directly. The key factor to make sure everything works as expected, is to guarantee the Firewall on the VPN (both ends) is correctly configured to allow communications with the “License Manager”, “Database” and “File Archives”.

Please talk to your IT provider to make sure the following “Ports” are “open” by configuring Firewall Rules within the VPN.

If you had already purchased SOLIDWORKS Professional or Premium, you are already entitled for SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard. So, why hassle when you can work from home?

Contact us now to know more about SOLIDWORKS PDM and we will be more than happy to assist you!