Hi,
In April of 2013 I purchased Solidworks 2014 Professional with annual subscription at a cost in excess of £6k. Prior to this I had been using Inventor 11 and we had (have) a lot of legacy data. The decision to move from this old version of Inventor was made quite hastily after the typical demo of Solidworks which promised to open inventor files and regenerate the features as good as the originals for saving as new solidworks files. Our old inventor version was still on an XP64 workstation and it was only after the purchase we found out that Solidworks needs windows 7 or newer as a platform. Inventor 11 won't run on anything newer than XP, so straight away a huge obstacle was in the way, as our plan was to begin new projects in Solidworks whilst slowly migrating/rebuilding our legacy data from inventor. I purchased a new HP Z420 workstation to use as the platform for Solidworks, but it soon became apparent that the software change was a bad idea. Solidworks won't open older Inventor files, so we went the route of installing a new trial version of inventor and using that to migrate the files, but to cut a long story short, the outcome of mass migrating files between Inventor and Solidworks was very dissapointing, and we threw in the towel. I've since purchased Autodesk Product Design Suite Premium and our single seat licence of Solidworks Pro 2014 is unused. Who would have guessed that the licencing terms state that we're not allowed to re-sell the licence?
I'm not prepared to let this £6k+ investment dissapear into the ether. The licence is installed on our workstation but can be transferred back to the solidworks licencing server in a few minutes.
I'm not a scammer, or counterfeiter..... A sucker? maybe, but never again.
Any of you guys got any ideas about getting round the small print on the licencing so I can get a portion of my expenditure on this software?
I'm thinking a long term loan to someone who would put this to good use. Subscription doesn't run out until the end of march 2014, and can be continued if it was worthwhile.

Del

 

Del Boy,

The only thing I can think of is to try to pressure the reseller, they might cave as you are really producing bad press for Solidworks.

IMHO Solidworks is the better software, but legacy files have always been the main reason to stay with Autodesk.

Kind Regards Trig

 

from the SolidWorks Knowledge base:
["You can import Autodesk® Inventor® assembly files (*.iam) into SolidWorks with
File, Open. You must have Inventor installed on your desktop, but it does not have to be running, to use the Inventor translator. You can now import files from Inventor 11 and above."


To workaround this, one can download and install the Autodesk Inventor Viewer from the following link:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=10535296&siteID=123112. The Viewer will allow Inventor file geomerty to be import. Inventor must be installed to import feature data.]




When you open the files using inventor viewer, they import as "dumb" solids (no feature tree history)


You may be able to actually download and install SolidWorks 2012 on the same workstation as inventor 11, then use Task Scheduler to convert all the inventor files to SolidWorks and place them on the network. You can then use the SolidWorks 2014 task scheduler to update the files, thus retaining your feature tree. and keeping your wise investment in SolidWorks. You could set it up to run over the weekend, and have updated files by monday.
Contact your SolidWorks retailer about getting a copy of SW 2012, simply explain your situation and they should be able to hook you up.

Have a good one!