Setting up Collaborative Space for SOLIDWORKS Electrical’s ESX

Electrical Schematic Designer is a role that brings the functionality of SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic Professional to the cloud. The design functionality is quite similar, but there are some modifications and changes in order to operate on 3DEXPERIENCE that this blog will focus on. We will cover the installation process, learning how to store your libraries and projects, and what working collaboratively on the Platform looks like.

Collaborative Space Setup

In order to work in a team environment on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, users must all be working on a collaborative space. To set up a collaborative space on the platform, open the 3DSpace widget, and select New Collaborative Space. From here you can add a name, description, and set permissions. Selecting the drop-down arrow on the far right of the space will allow you to add content and members.

Once the space is created and permissions are set, ensure all users with the role Electrical Schematic Designer are pointing to and have access to this collaborative space. Once this has happened and everyone can share files, one person can work on a project at a time from the same shared library – which can entail parts/projects/templates – in that collaborative space. Unsure what space you’re working in? Simply check the top right-hand corner of the Schematic Design window.

Installation

Installing ESX is significantly easier than an installation of SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic desktop, since you don’t require an installation of SQL. There really are only three steps once you are assigned the role. First, select the drop down and click install. You will then be asked what file location you’d like for your install directory. Clicking next will complete the installation, and you can then select finish.

Once finished, all you’ll need to do is open up Electrical Schematic Design and proceed to create the environment according to your vision and standards.

Getting started: Unarchiving Your Environment

Setting up your environment

Your familiarity with the interface and procedure depends on whether you’re an existing electrical user moving to the platform vs. a new user. It’s best to have a good starting place when developing your shared content, like a parts library, project templates, title blocks, etc. New users can get this default environmental content from the Electrical Content Portal (ECP) and continue to search the portal for new content. This is available for download in the tool panel on the right side of the application’s window. To get the largest bulk of library content immediately, select environments, then select ANSI or IEC based on which standard you typically work with.

Creating new projects or modifying existing ones is also a viable course of action. Existing Electrical users can just complete the ‘Archive Environment’ feature in SWE Desktop. Unarchiving this in ESX will make all your existing content ready to use.

Unarchive environment

Unarchiving anything, whether it is your existing environment or a default from the ECP, locates the data locally on your machine. You can identify symbols that are stored locally vs on the platform by going into symbol management and checking to see if the status is “new” or “exists”, which will also indicate which collaborative space the symbol is stored in. These controls from symbol management also apply to all other management categories under library.

Sharing Content to the Platform

Pushing content to the platform is really simple. Select what you want to save, and hit save or save with options to specify a location other than the default with any other relevant information, like comments or if you’d like to bump the revision. Load from server will copy that content to your local machine. Have there been updates to that part? Just hit “reload from server” to copy the latest version. “Refresh status” will show any updates.

Reload from server

When it comes to project templates, like items previously, you can access existing templates from the ECP or create your own. Saving them to the platform can be done by selecting the “Save as Templates” function – but it’s important to note that this requires the user to have ‘write-access’ to the targeted collaborative space, meaning that they must have a Leader access role. This may require your admin to designate that access to you.

Save as template

Library structure

When we say “push to the platform”, what’s really happening is content is being stored in collaborative spaces on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. It’s worth noting that library content is only stored in your ‘Common Space’ area.