As a consultant, I do this all the time on small projects for various customers, and I'm just careful not to open & save files in a newer SolidWorks version than they are supposed to be in. I have had the occasional slip-up and have had to either defer to backups or convince the customer that it's worth going to the new version. But it's usually just me or one or two other power users I trust.
BUT I have a different situation I'm faced with now. I've been consulting pretty much full time since April for a company, and we have been doing this sizable project for a big-name company, using SW2010 and PDMW. The company I'm consulting for is now bidding on another project for another big name company (really another division of the same big-name company) who wants their project done in SW2009. Needless to say, we REALLY don't want to go back to SW2009, especially with large projects going on in SW2010 (and really we'd prefer to go ahead and move into 2011). We want to offer alternate bids emphasizing the extra cost of having to go to an older version.
Listed below are some of our concerns. Please feel free to add to the list and/or comment on the items on the list you have experience with and/or opinions about.
- Second PDMW vault needed for SW2009 files (right)?
- Legacy models we want to re-use, that will need to be saved in a neutral format such as STEP or IGES and brought into SW2009 as dumb solids, some of which we would want to make changes to.
- The danger that if we run multiple versions on one machine, someone will almost certainly inadvertantly open 2009 files in 2010 and save them.
- The cost of running a network of computers completely isolated from those running 2010, to avoid the scenario in the previous bullet
- As a further complication, we have a handful of people working on current projects, and would have about as many working on the new project, some of whom would also still need to support the existing projects (needing access to both 2009 and 2010 and their respective files).
- and the list goes on.
