PDMWorks Advanced Server Set-Up

[pdybeck]

Has anyone here set up Advanced Server for their company? My VAR added a $1,200 set-up cost to a quote they just submitted to us. Could this set-up easily be done by anyone with half a brain, or is it much more involved than what I think? We have an IT staff here that could make an attempt at set-up, but I wanted to see if anyone had any information and insight on the matter. Thanks in advance.

Pete Yodis

 

[SBaugh]

I had to contact SW to finish setting mine up, but I had documentation from the VAR's to help with mine to begine with and I still had trouble getting it set up.

A lot of it I think is Networking and I'm not a network man yet. Getting ready to take some classes on that to help me understand.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376
faq559-716 - SW Fora Users

 

[engAlright]

Do you already have a PDMWorks vault running, and you're upgrading to Advanced Server, or are you doing the whole thing from scratch?

If you're upgrading, you can probably manage it yourself. The webportal does require some IIS knowledge, and from what I understand there are some tricks to setting up Toolbox, but other then that it's pretty straight forward.

If you're starting from scratch I would get your VAR involved as it is very important to get things set up properly the first time. Your VAR's experience and (hopefully) expertise will come in handy.

 

[pdybeck]

engAlright,

We have been using PDMWorks for roughly 2 years now, so we will be adding the Advanced Server as an upgrade. We don't use toolbox as a parts database, but just as a means to create copies of parts, which we check into the vault. I am primarily interested in any information concerning set-up of the web portal. What IIS knowledge is required and what are the basic steps needed? Thanks for the information so far.

 

[engAlright]

I am not an IT expert, but in our installation all I had to do was:

-install IIS on the machine running the PDMWorks vault (IIS and the webportal can be running on another machine if you want)
-modify your PDMWorks vault installation to include the webportal
-go to IIS (Start-Run-type in inetmgr) now under the computer and default website there will be an entry for PDMWeb
-on any IE browser (has to be V6 or better) the path to the default web page will be the IP of the IIS server followed by:

pdmweb/lang/english/default.htm

-each computer accessing the webportal should have a copy of the Solidworks viewer - you can't open documents that you have read-only rights too, you can only view them

You may have to involve your IT folks to handle security issues or Intranet vs. Internet issues (though I would be a little wary of making your webportal available to the world).

Hope this helps.

 

[pdybeck]

Thanks engAlright.

Thats exactly what I was looking for. I'm not an IT expert either, but my VAR's $1200 price tag for what looks like just a few steps seems to be way overpriced, as I suspected. This portal will be just for in-house (intranet) use and won't be available outside the confines of our local network, so security is somewhat of a moot point. Thanks for your help.

Pete Yodis

 

[ctopher]

I could have probably did it my self, but we had to move everything to a new advanced server. We brought in support to make sure it was handled properly. It still took us ~8 hrs. Most of it was moving the 25gb vault.

Chris
Sr. Mechanical Designer, CAD
SolidWorks 2005 SP0.1