SolidWorks® Administration Bible

Chapter 1. Defining CAD Administration

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Defining a CAD administration

• Playing the CAD administration role

• Defining yourself as an expert user and mentor

This book is aimed primarily at helping you prioritize the necessary tasks to run SolidWorks efficiently, and set up multiple computers at your company. The intended audience is power users acting as CAD Administrators, professional CAD Administrators, and Information Technology (IT) professionals trying to perform the duties of a CAD Administrator. Even those of you who are AutoCAD Administrators and need to do a SolidWorks installation should be able to get something out of the book, although I assume you are already thoroughly familiar with SolidWorks from a user's point of view.

In the preparation for writing this book, I wrestled with the terms CAD Administration and CAD Management. I read other books and blogs on the topic, and talked with many people who actually do the work. This research helped me understand that from one company to another, vast differences exist in how those companies are organized. In particular, there are almost as many different ways to create engineering and design data, flesh it out, and document it in a form that can be manufactured, as there are different companies. Some of this is strictly driven by a company's size: Larger companies have a tendency to allow more specialization, and smaller companies require people to have a broad range of skills.

Some large companies have the equivalent ...