This is an introduction to the SOLIDWORKS PDM Web 2 interface. A benefit of this system is that no software needs to be installed on the client and you can simply send the users a website address that they can enter in their web browser which they can then also add as a favourite for access again in the future. The website can be restricted in access to your company's local intranet or indeed you can make it publicly available on the internet. The logon screen here has two drop downs. The first one is for the selection of the vault. Now most customers will just have a single vault so there will be nothing to change there. The next selection is the type of license that you want to use. So there are two options. The web. Now the web license is available to you and you will be able to log on with that as long as there is a free SOLIDWORKS PDM CAD editor license, a contributor license or indeed a PSL license. The viewer is available if there is a viewer license or again a PSL license. So for this part of the introduction I'm going to use the web license and I'm going to enter a username and password. Now because I've logged on before I've saved my username and password so I'm going to select that click the login and I'm taken through to the top level of the vault and displayed all the folders that I have access to and that access is controlled by the permissions on my user or the group that I am in. So navigating around these folder structures is done with a single click. So I'm going to click on projects here. And then I'm going to go into the project for here. And then into the design folder within that. So this shows me all the files that are available within that folder including details about the files such as description, revision, number, the state it was in, etc. Now there may be hundreds or even thousands of files in a single folder sometimes. So it may be wise to make use of the search utility. So up here we've got the search icon. When I click on the search icon gives me a box to enter details that I want to search for. Now the search fields here say I can search on file or folder name, comment, description and number. You can also add in the configuration for this setup additional search criteria such as you might want to search for material, etc. or any variable that is defined on the data card for the file. There are also options here about how you're searching, whether I'm searching all folders, which is basically the whole of the vault, whether I'm searching from the current folder and its subfolders or the current folder only. Now the best type of search is to stick to all folders because you may be getting less results than you want. So in here I'm going to enter a search of manifold. So I'm searching for files that have manifold in their description. Clicking on the search returns me all the files that have manifold in their name. Now that list is too many for me. So I'm going to restrict it even further. Clicking on the search again, I'm going to add manifold with top after it. Now I have a much less of a list and it's easy to select the file I want. So I can see here I've got two assemblies. One's in project O02 and one's in project O04. So this is the one that I'm interested in. Clicking on the file. Will take me through to the preview. Now the first preview that comes up is a bitmap. It's not interactive. But clicking on the e-drawings icon here. We'll load the full interactive e-drawings preview. And from within that you've got several functions that are available down here on the side and also up here at the top. So for example, I could select the feature tree effectively that shows me all the features or parts within that assembly. Clicking on a part will highlight it inside the assembly. Let's click on this top one here and then you've got some options on the end where you can hide and show, make it transparent, hide everything else and also show all. You've got a configuration tab here. Now this assembly only has one configuration in, so I can't switch to any others, but that's where you would do that if you needed to. You've got an explode view here so you can quickly explode the view of the assembly. You've also got a section view, so I'll collapse that back down. Section view here comes in like that and you can twist it around into any section view you like there. Over here, these buttons are full screen, so I can switch that into full screen mode and then zoom in on that. Can we turn to the normal mode if you wish? You've got different display types, so you've got shaded with wireframe. Let's turn off the section view a minute. Shaded with wireframe, shaded without the wireframe and then the various wireframe options so you can look at there. I personally prefer that mode of view. You've got a play icon here which animates through the views so I'll simply cycle through all the views that are available within that assembly. And you can stop that at any time. Press the home key to return to the home. You can look at the contains tab. So this assembly shows me what are contained within it and all the details for that here. Under the options over here, you can turn on and off various other variables. So if I wanted to add the project number, in this case it's all the same, but you can turn that on and off from the options there. I've also got where used. So on where used in this instance, this assembly is simply used on its own drawing. Back to the contain tabs for a minute and what you can do in here where you see the name is you can multi-select files. So I could multi-select that and if I wish then change their state, check them out, download them or even delete them. But also even without that selected, because I'm selected on this assembly, there is an option here under the download where I can download file with references. So this will download this assembly with all its references. And if I wanted to draw in as well, then I would do that from the drawing. So let's use the download with references function just to show you how that works. That comes up with this window here. And as you can see, you can use the latest or the reference version of each files. You've got an option here to preserve relative paths or not. So if you preserve the paths, then the whole folder structure will be preserved within the zip file that it's going to create when you download it. I'm going to turn that off so they're all downloaded into a single folder. Click on download. Being a web browser, it will do the normal thing and download it. From there, you can access it clicking show in folder. That will take you to your downloads area. And there is your zip file, which contains all of those files. So let's extract that. And from within there, you can see there's the assembly and all the parts used on that assembly within the one level. As I said, if you had preserved the structure, it would have had multi levels for that. If I had checked the files out and I could open them up here, make a modification and check them back in, which I will do in a minute on a single file of Word document. But that shows you how the download works there. So let's go and find the Word document that I want to work on today. So I know it's in this project, which is where I'm working. It's under the specification folder. There is the document there. Now I could click on that again. It would load the preview. Alternatively, I can just select it there and then I can check it out. Which will reserve it to me. I can also then from that download it. So this time I don't need any references. It's a single document download again. It appears in my tray down here. Show in folder. I can open up that document. So the change I'm going to make here is to delete the contents of this second page, which is just notes to me on how I should fill this document out. So there you go. All that blue text is gone now. I'm going to save that document. Close it. Back to the web interface. And now I can check this file back in to overwrite it. So on here with the plus icon, I can check in the files. You can see I could also, if I wish to, create a new folder or check in a complete file structure. So I'm just going to check in this one file. And the way this works is it browses to your last access. So I need to change that to my downloads folder. Select the file that I want to check in. And click open. Add a comment. So just say that that was updated. And if I wish to, I could add more files to check in in this occasion, but I just want this one. So check in. You get notification up here like success. And there you can see it's created a second version of this file, which is now with the modified contents. Another way you can add files. So if I go to another folder, so I want to add some other documentation into this area here. So again, it's using the check in files. So these don't exist in the vault yet. There's something I created outside. I'm going to add them to the vault now. So check in browse. So this time it's in my documents area. I've got some work in progress documents there. Select all of those. Select open. Add a comment if you wish. And select check in. And there you go again. That's checked in those two files, both of version one. And now I could, if I wish to, select a file and change its state. Here on a single file, you select the transition you wish. So I wish to submit this for check in. Add a comment again, if you wish, change the state. And then that goes into the pending checking state. So also my job today is to go back to my design. And I'll just show you how the change state works on the whole of an assembly. So this is my manifold that I was looking at earlier. And I'm going to select the drawer in this time. Again, you've got the same preview you had before, which is a bitmap. I could go into actively into that if I wished. But what I want to do here is go onto the contains tab, select everything. And change the state on all of these files. So this time, rather than individually selecting each one, what you can do is do a change all, submit for approval. And that will submit all of those files in one go for approval. And add a comment if you wish. Change state. And those files now move into pending approval. So that's my job done as this user. So up here, I'm going to log out. And this time when we log in, we're going to log in using the viewer license and log in as a different user. And when we log in here, first thing you'll notice is I've got much less access. So I could only see projects, change notes and reference documents here. Navigation is the same. So go into the folder you wish to. And when you select a file this time. So this one I'm looking at was the manifold here. Now I don't have the ability to check it out. That is controlled by my permissions within the system. I've also disabled the download for this particular user. And he can't delete the file. But what you can do even as a viewer is participate in the workflow with the change state. So if I went to that on the contains tab. Then I can select everything there. If I'm happy with it. And do the change state. This time I'm going to say it's all approved because I'm happy with it. Click the change state. So that shows you even as a viewer with restricted access, I could participate in our workflow.