As being part of the ESS program and having P&H Mining Corp as my assignment,  I was able to experience the frustrations that our large accounts experience when going through a large migration from one version of SolidWorks to the next.

One area that really caused a lot of issues was the file upgrade process.

P&H Mining Co. has probably close to 300k SolidWorks files in their systems that needed to be upgraded from SolidWorks 2009 to SolidWorks 2011.

The only tool that we (SolidWorks) could provide was the "Network Monitor" utility that really only good for distributing the conversion process to 3-4 PCs

Needless to say, the customer was not happy with the performance and the issues that where encounter trying use this tool to convert the size of the SolidWorks Data that they had.

The upgrade process at P&H Mining Corp. took close to 1- 2 months

We should provide a world class upgrade utility that can be used for V1 customers and then for V6 customers

Here is a e-mail from another ESS customer C.G. Bretting  that converted 199,000 files with SW 2011 and a utility from MechWorks/IPS:

Hello all,

     The first word that comes to mind is Awesome!!  We have completed our upgrade/conversion to SolidWorks 2011 in record time.  We startedFriday night around 4:30 pm and have finished the conversion at 4:30pm on Saturday.  We have never finished a conversion before Sunday afternoon.  The upgrade/conversion process consisted of upgrading 95 installs of SolidWorks and converting 199,000 files in the vault. 

    On behalf of the Bretting team I would like to thank SolidWorks and MechWorks/IPS for assisting in the effort and making great improvements in their products!   Throughout the testing/conversion this has been the most stable version of SolidWorks we’ve had, let’s hope the users see the same result.  IPS and MechWorks helped us with our enhancement requests and delivered a conversion wizard that worked great this year.  Windows 7 64 bit helped tremendously as well, throughout the conversion I would bet we had to do  less than 6 computer reboots!

   I know Andy and I are definitely grateful and excited for this version of SolidWorks and DBWorks.  Let’s keep working hard to make improvements and keep building our relationships.

Thanks,

Eric