SOLIDWORKS Collaborative or Multi-user Environment

Engineer Tim and Project Manager Mark are working on a same SOLIDWORKS assembly file. Tim opens the master assembly gets the write access , later Mark opens the same assembly  gets read access. Now Tim has finished editing and now Mark wants the write access. Usually both will close and reopen the assembly. With SOLIDWORKS multi user environment you can easily give away the write access, this allows you to work in a collaborative environment. This is usually helpful when working with files over the network.

To use this you will need to enable the option ‘enable multi-user environment’ on all the systems where collaborative environment needs to be used

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With the file open you can navigate to File > Mark read only, this enables another user to gain write access of that component. In the case of a part file you need to go to the pulldown menu File and select Get Write Access.

When working with these options, it might be that you get a lot of warnings about saving read-only files. This can be quite annoying. To get rid of this, go to Tools – Options. Select External References and check Don’t prompt to save read-only referenced documents (discard changes).

Note that the multi-user environment is not a replacement of PDM. It helps to get easy read/write access to the files without reopening.

Mithilesh Kapre
Applications Engineer
Central Innovation, Sydney

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