Hey all,
I'm coming to this forum to ask a pretty general question, albeit vague. I'm doubtful that there's an answer to my question, but I'd like to ask this, with all seriousness. Why is it so difficult to tell where I'm at and what the website's purpose is? This is aimed at ALL of the SolidWorks websites.
The old forum was scrapped, for reasons that I understand, and acknowledge that changes had to be made. Is 3DSwym going to be - hate to say - fixed, or at least actively finessed? I've been on it for the last month and still am having trouble integrating to it. I feel like I've been given two 5-gallon buckets of jelly beans and told to sort them to find the flavors I like by strangers that I don't know, and they haven't told me that there are no beans in the flavor that I like. I'll add that this term (3DSwym) is not at all intuitive, at least to myself, and still absolutely melts my brain to type it. It took me fifteen minutes of googling to even find what this means, and I proudly consider myself an excellent googler.
I did manage to get notifications hooked up to my email, which I will say is nice. The main reason I come to the forums is to help where I can, but even the notifications can't be filtered by tag or similar (to my knowledge...would love to be corrected).
You can stick article upon article in front of me explaining what 3DEXPERIENCE is, and I may understand it on its face (I think?). What I get lost in is everything beneath it (3DSwym then what?). For instance when I click the 3DS dial, I get a load of options for applications of 3DEXPERIENCE for System of Operations or Business Models....but I'm only interested in the User Forum. Am I shopping for 3DEXPERIENCE or browsing the forums? Am I supposed to be here? Inevitably I shrug and close the tab after I THINK I've perused the latest posts/questions that I found, using the incredibly tedious DataGrid search method.
If I go to solidworks.com, click on the little man to log in, it'll show me several options, most notably: MySolidworks, SW Customer Portal, & 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. Why are there so many places to go in addition to solidworks.com? If I go to solidworks.com to find documentation from the Support tab, it spits me out to 3ds.com - I think "what the heck - do I need to be here?" Still don't know. Finding docs pertinent to SOLIDWORKS is then a marathon of clicking links and backing out.
So if I click MySolidworks, I'm redirected to my.solidworks.com. Nice - I can live with that. Wait - it's not at all clear what the intent of MySolidworks is, but the UI is noticably different from solidworks.com. If I browse around, I can find things related to training/models/legacy forums (think it's actually linked to 3DEXPERIENCE?). Maybe if I can manage to login without getting yelled at, I'd like it, but still feels overwhelming to get so much information thrown at me when it's not clear WHY all of the information is there.
Say I decide to click on SW Customer Portal, I get thrown into a similar but clearly different UI with a new domain. Again, so much information on tabs that I just have an overload. At this point I'm scared that clicking a link will redirect me back to solidworks.com, only to find myself in a circular reference, scrambling to just FIND SW Customer Portal again. Before anyone asks, clicking 'Back' on my browser has mixed results. In my opinion, I should clearly know where I'm going when I click a button on a webpage. Actually, in the process of writing this post, I got locked out of SW Customer Portal, and am evidently blocked from accessing solidworks.com. ???????!!?! ?????????????????????
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.solidworks.com/" on this server.
Reference #18.1b9333b8.1619460260.87ca057
I guess my question can be revised to: does anyone else have these issues? I feel like I'm going crazy. Too many domains, too much FLUFF, too much redirecting, too many circular references, too many terms, too many 3DEXPERIENCE sales pitches, too many frustrations.
Am I even posting in the right forum? Guess we'll find out.
