Today the “What’s New in SolidWorks 2009″ party arrived in Lexington.

Yesterday I asked a customer if I would see him today at this rollout. He stated that his company is still using SolidWorks 2007 and his IS department has no short term plans to upgrade to 2009.

[My first reaction was anger. I hate it when IS departments determine what is best for other departments. Their job is supposed to support the company, but so often the tail wags the dog. <sigh> this is a blog for another day] I counted to ten. I admit I do see this customer’s point. However I contend it is still important to come see what is new in the software so you can plan; and look for a valuable new feature that would make the return on investment worth going to the CEO and tattling on the IS guys for not doing their job.

One other [perhaps more professional] reason: Any time you can watch a guy who is really good with SolidWorks (as an example Randy Simmons; who did the rollout today) you need to take some time to watch. There are so many things in SolidWorks, you always pick up something new. Here is an example: Randy was showing the new 2009 ability to put custom properties into equations. His example was he was taking the part’s mass and multiplying it by a constant “$/pound”. Thus the cost of the part updates automatically through equations. Several people in the room did not know that SolidWorks could automatically tell you what the weight of a part is….and has been able to do this since the beginning. They had been doing this by hand! You may have already known this, but think of the time these guys saved just with a little aside like that. I know that everyone in the room picked up a little tip today – something to make them a better SolidWorks user than their competition.

Vik Vedantham was wearing gray slacks with his “peach” 3DVision shirt –overall a great ensemble.

It is now Wednesday and still no groupies. Is it possible they don’t follow engineering functions?

Off to Louisville Kentucky.

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So today for the third stop on the tour, we are in Solon.

For those of you who like to put a face with the name, Robert Warren, our three time Top Gun support guy, made a guest appearance.

That is Robert on the left, Jordan Tadic on the right. Suppose Robert’s Grandfather is walking around mumbling -trying to figure out where his favorite tie went?

Vik Vedantham was wearing gray slacks with his orange 3DVision shirt. He mixed things up a bit by wearing black shoes instead of the brown ones he wore Friday –overall a great ensemble.

I thought I saw our first groupies…but turns out it was just the line waiting to get into the women’s locker room.

Off to Lexington Kentucky.

Toledo. Home of Tony Packos, the Mud Hens, Jamie Farr, and the second stop on 3DVision’s What’s New in SolidWorks 2009 tour.

I have been looking forward to this day for a while. This is the first time I have gotten to see our new applications engineer, Jordan Tadic in action. It appears he is as good as advertised. He had good pace and really was able to show the cool new features well. The people of Northern Ohio have it pretty good.

It always interests me how different groups have personalities. I had very few questions in Cincy, but almost 15 minutes worth of questions here in Toledo….from many people too, not just one guy hogging up all the time. Several people were very interested in Enterprise’s new ability to confirm state changes with password verification.

As a change of pace, Balaji Chandrasekaran from SolidWorks showed the new features of Cosmos. Check out Seth’s post that he did earlier today.

There were no groupies; perhaps the word out on the street isn’t out yet?

See ya in Cleveland.

What do Skip Prosser, Thad Matta and Scott High have in common? They all totally dominated in Xavier’s Cintas Center!

Today, in Cincinnati, was 3DVision’s first stop on our whirlwind tour showing off the new features of SolidWorks 2009. The room we were in was only yards away from the Musketeer’s home court. It was pretty cool.

It was great fun watching people’s reaction when they saw the new features for the first time. I like to think the new BOM features found in Enterprise stole the show, but the crowd seemed to be the most interested in the PhotoView 360 package.

(The pic above is of Scott in action. With those two bright projector screens my cheap camera phone didn’t have a chance!)

Vik Vedantham was wearing gray slacks and an oversized gray sweatshirt with his orange 3DVision shirt underneath. I don’t know who his barber is, I hope Vik tipped him well, he did a great job –overall a great ensemble.

There were no groupies; but this is our first stop. I am hopeful they will start showing at our other events.

See ya in Toledo.