Do you have a PDM? already there for me there is no interest PDM becomes interesting on the sets of Design Office min 5 User but that's only my personal opinion
After a reseller is as his name suggests a salesman he will always try to sell you more :/
For trying to deploy PDM, it was a disaster for the recovery of the Workgroup's data.
Moreover if I understood correctly, with the sql base you have to evolve it every year as well as SW, which is not our case. So for the moment we stayed on SW 2015 with the workgroup, a system that is more than enough for us for archiving.
After all, the goal of a reseller is to sell... so no mystery
Why doesn't Solidworks or the resellers (VISATIV in this case) develop a mill that would allow to convert the files of the PDM Workgroup vault to inject them into PDM Std?
PDM tools can be useful even from 2 users. They allow us to do collaborative work. We have set up the PDM tool to have the history of changes with the index of the components, and to know the use cases of the STD components. And the vault is also used as a backup archive.
@flegendre Standard PDM is also on SQL but express which limits the size of the database.
@emmanuel.burr recovery mill development with PDM STANDARD is not possible because one of the main differences between PRO and STANDARD is the fact that in STANDARD there is no development API available as is the case in PRO. So it is more up to the publisher, in this case Dassault Systèmes, to create a transfer mill.
Then to come back to the question why the PRO and not the STANDARD, it all depends on your needs, if you want to connect to your ERP, if you want several workflows, if you want to manage complete projects (SOLIDWORKS files, OFFICE, ....) and many other reasons, you need the PRO.
I'm correcting it again, but it's much much easier to go from Standard to Pro than from WorkGroup to Standard.
Indeed Standard and PRO are on the same data structure so the switch is simple, but WorkGroup and PDM are on a totally different basis which therefore requires to do recovery macros and therefore only PDM PRO allows it.
So how can I get my Workgroups vault back in PDM std. My management has made it clear to me that it will not invest in an additional application. 'We'll have the PDM Std, we'll use it. It's included in SW Pro.'
Just a question by the way. How do other WorkGroup customers like me do it, and who wants to upgrade to the new version?
Wouldn't there be another solution? To implement PDM STD.
Do we need to migrate the entire Workgroup vault at once ?
Can we imagine migrating only new business to the new safe? And go and get the old stuff from the old trunk if it comes back ? And migrate them at that time ?
Interesting as a subject but you learn even more constraints (with for example a database limited to 10Gb if I understand correctly of course the standard version.
The most shocking thing is that SW does not make an automatic, simple and integrated platform to migrate the workgroup data.