Matthew West just revealed the mystery guest speaker for February 9, 2009, at SolidWorks World 2009 in Orlando, Florida:  RICHARD BRANSON!!!

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you know that it is becoming easier and easier to "network" with other like-minded individuals around the world.  The proliferation of Web 2.0 "social media" networks (sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, and MySpace instantly spring to mind) is growing by leaps and bounds.  It seems like every week, there are a dozen new services to join (yes, I am a joiner).  Even SolidWorks is in the fray with 3D ContentCentral.
One of the key things …

It is drawing ever closer…the day when thousands of SolidWorks employees, users, and vendors converge on the Happiest Place on Earth.  SolidWorks World 2009 will be here before you know it and for a few days, the ratio of engineers to rodents in the House of Mouse will skyrocket!
Jason over at RockSolid Perspective has pulled together some great testimonials on attending the upcoming SolidWorks World 2009 conference in his post, Orlando or Bust…What Others Are Saying.  He posed the question, "As a user who has been to a previous …

Welcome to CADFanatic‘s Tips & Tricks Tuesday!  Hopefully, this will become a regular feature here on CADFanatic.  Every Tuesday I plan to post a short tip or trick that will hopefully help you become more proficient with SolidWorks.
So at a SolidWorks 2009 What’s New presentation I gave a couple of weeks ago, I was working in SolidWorks and mating two components together.  As I added the mate, literally everyone in the room said in unison, "How did you do that??  Is that a new feature in 2009?"
I was a little …

The latest version of 3D ContentCentral is now in Beta.  You can check it out here.  Similar to the SolidWorks Beta program, there will be three Beta periods over 8 weeks.  The Beta 1 period runs from October 23rd through November 6th.
There are several new features in the 2009 version of 3D ContentCentral, including social-networking community features.  One very interesting new feature is "collaborative content authoring" that will enable users to "submit improvements to existing models".  That way, people can add to (or correct) models that others have posted.
The …

In part 1 of this series, I laid out the steps for creating a SolidWorks administrative image.  In this article, I will describe how to apply a service pack to create a new image that will automatically roll out to your users.  Again, the SolidWorks version shown in this series is Solidworks 2008, but based on my experience, the procedures for creating a SolidWorks 2009 Administrative Image is similar.
First off, prepare your file folders.  In this case, I am upgrading from SolidWorks 2008 Service Pack 3.1 to 4.0.  So I …

The free sheet metal certification exam offer ends this coming Tuesday, September 30.  The code to get the free exam was originally emailed out to all Certified SolidWorks Professionals (CSWP’s), but it was also posted in the last (September 23) issue of SolidWorks Express (under NEWS and EVENTS).
Don’t think you have what it takes?  Work through the tutorials and take the sample exam.  I don’t really do much sheet metal, a part here or there, but I ran through the sample exam before taking the exam, and I just passed …

If you are attending SolidWorks World 2009 in Orlando, Florida, this next February and were planning on visiting DisneyWorld or some of the other attractions in the area, SolidWorks has made arrangements for anyone attending to get discounted tickets.  This site will allow you to order tickets at a cheaper price than what you can get at the gate or ordering online.
They ship the tickets directly to you, so you must submit your completed order form no later than January 16, 2009.  They will also be onsite at the conference, …

SolidWorks provides the ability to create administrative install images that can be used to make a CAD administrator’s job much less stressful by allowing quick and easy installation of SolidWorks.  There are several benefits to using an administrative image, such as:

standardizing installations across multiple seats/locations.
pushing out file locations and/or customizations.
performing pre- and post-install maintenance or other tasks.
easily apply service packs.
ability to quickly and easily roll back to an earlier service pack if there are any problems with a service pack.

The creation of these administrative images used to have to be …

Well, today was a long day…but it was very interesting!  There was a few of us blogging live from the press event.  I took notes and want to formulate my thoughts a little (plus, I’m really tired!), so I will have a few posts coming up on the goings-on in Barcelona.  I just wanted to give an overview of the day’s happenings.
The day started off with Jeff Ray, CEO of DS SolidWorks, delivering the keynote, “Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Initiatives”.  The theme was:
“Provide our customers with all the necessary tools to …