CAD Forum

Hello all,

How do you distribute the Solidworks settings to the clients in your company and make sure that everyone is using the correct settings?

Some of the active here support installations with around 100 licenses? I can't imagine that the admin here goes from client to client and makes the user settings.

Transferring the user settings from one client to another using the Copy Settings Wizard is not recommended. (I do it anyway).

On some clients I tried to use the settings administrator. Puuhhh, the result was far from satisfactory. (Now I have to see how to get rid of the "plague" without reinstalling Solidworks completely).

As mentioned above, I currently use the wizard to copy the user settings, even though it is not recommended. I do this because besides the system options I also want to distribute some user specific settings, such as the value for the bend reduction. Adjustments in the menus, add dimensioning when sketching slotted holes,.......

There are two places where my method doesn't run quite cleanly:
1. after importing the user settings on a client, the first time Solidworks is started, a message appears that the position of the toolbox has changed. And you have to choose if you want to use the new or old position.

2. with the settings I can distribute the suppressed messages, but not clean up the messages added by the user himself. A large part of the user's requests "The function does not work for me, or is no longer there..." is due to the fact that the user has added another message to suppress. If you then look at the list on the computer, it is so long that it can no longer be displayed in its entirety......

Are you also struggling with these challenges? How do you do it?
Is there a usable guide on how to distribute the settings?
Do you distribute the settings via registry? What do you need to be aware of when doing this?

I've tried to use the settings administrator with limited success in most cases. It seems the settings I save aren't always the settings it provides to users, but I digress.

I usually initially set the user settings during the Admin image install process by running a batch file after the installation of SW. This is usually a curated list of registry settings (PDM Add-in Columns, SW File Locations, Colors, etc.). I imagine that you could also deploy something via Active Directory with the help of your IT group, but I don't know how "locked down" you want the settings to be/stay.

There are different sections of setting.
Do you need to control all of them?
ie All file locations?
If so, use admin install image.

The Toolbox message possible means user didn't install everything same as you.
Some files are in different location.

So export what you need from settings. Not everything.

Do NOT save or copy settings on first start of SW. The file will be empty because SW haven't write settings to registry yet.
Close SW, start it again.

We have 2 main installation profiles, I custom made the REG files for each one and I have used a batch file + admin image to deploy to over 100 workstations.

・based on ip/host name -> installation profile/configuration files
・Preprocessing -> uninstall some third party software, force PDM process down
・Install SW
・Postprocessing -> install some third party software with their license , overwrite HKLM, HKCU for SW:
System options, Toolbars/macro, PDM settings, default addins, edrawings settings, simulation settings.
Clean up the hard disk (old unused toolbox folders etc), forced reboot
・After reboot I have some script for Vault view creation if needed

Due to internal directives we had to login to every single machine to launch the installer and for final setup, so I made a batch file to launch remote desktop from a list of hostname. Never the less it took 3 persons roughly 1.5 day to complete all.
It was the first time we tried something like this and went OK.

Be VERY careful to use SLDREG as REG files as SW exports files not compliant with REGEDIT4 syntax on the pretext they are imported, checked and corrected by SW settings utility... I had an hard crash issue in the UI due to SLDREG files I barely touched, beliving (silly me) that SW would export clean files.

On the other hand the admin settings inside admin image lacks a LOT of control and some customization is not available, also to configurate some local PDM option, and other addins you have to go down the registry anyway.

TEST with at lest 3 machines and 2 different persons, prepare a batch to destroy all registry entries and folders after the uninstall, reinstall ... repeat

I suggest to split the registry settings in categories (system options, UI etc) so If something goes wrong it is easier to find and repair it.

When I was working (I'm retired) I leveraged Stefan Berlitz's Copy Document Options Spreadsheet http://swtools.cad.de/download.htm to do this.

Large caveat here, the file refenced is VERY old (circa 2007), but it wasn't terribly difficult to update it to v2023. You will need to be fairly familiar with VBA. I left it for the new person (stuckee) to use when setting up new SolidWorks instantiations.

No, I cannot share the file, as I don't have a copy as it was on a closed network.

Good luck