The Use of Product Data Management (PDM) Software to Support Student Design Projects

Industry recognizes the central importance of managing and sharing CAD data within the organization, and powerful Product Data Management (PDM) systems have been developed to address this need However, engineering schools have been slow to adopt PDM technology, and student design teams typically rely on a variety of ad hoc approaches to manage shared CAD data. To address the PDM requirements of student projects, the University of Western Ontario acquired and deployed PDMWorks in January 2006. PDMWorks is a midrange PDM system for SolidWorks. Installation and administration of this midrange product are very straightforward, and its tight integration with SolidWorks makes PDMWorks easy to use. However, PDMWorks is best suited to relatively small workgroups, and does not scale easily to large numbers of users.