SolidWorks 2025 Aims for Speed and Enhanced Collaboration

Dassault Systèmes has launched SolidWorks 2025, the latest release of its portfolio of 3D design and product development applications. The new version features enhanced collaboration and data management as well as streamlined workflows for parts, assemblies, and drawings. SolidWorks 2025 enhances 3D dimensioning and tolerancing, electrical and pipe routing, ECAD/MCAD collaboration, and rendering.

The release also includes updates to SolidWorks PDM, SolidWorks Simulation, SolidWorks Electric Schematic, SolidWorks Electrical Schematic Designer, and DraftSight applications that enable better and faster design. SolidWorks will continue its seamless integration with the 3DExperience platform in the cloud, which unifies data and applications with the latest technologies to ensure they work collaboratively and with the latest files. 

Some of the notable updates include:

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We caught up with SolidWorks CEO, Manish Kumar to get more detail on the updated platform.

What aspects of SolidWorks 2025 are going to be most helpful to your customers?

Manish Kumar: We enhanced platform collaboration, enabling users to easily share models with industry peers, inside and outside the organization, by accessing communities directly from SolidWorks. No matter if you use 3DExperience SolidWorks or SolidWorks with Cloud Services, you will benefit from the seamless integration with the 3DExperience platform.

Take, for example, multi-approval timestamps which help you enforce company rules on drawings. Anyone who is part of the approval workflow, can easily log in from a web browser, review the drawing, and approve it – anywhere and at any time. The approval timestamp appears automatically on the drawing, alleviating the need for manual work.

Image courtesy of SolidWorks.

We also took the tight integration with the platform to the next level with real-time notifications of status updates. If you are working on a model and someone has modified it, you will get a notification when you open the model. When you get the notification, you will have the option to reload the data from the server or see the outdated components to understand what has changed. These notifications help ensure that you are always working with the latest version of your files.

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Image courtesy of SolidWorks.

These are the kinds of enhancements we are on a mission to deliver to help you make your workflows simpler and your efforts more productive. We know that working in silos has a high cost and real-time, seamless collaboration is a must. Breaking silos can only happen when we integrate tightly with the platform.

It accelerates part and assembly design. It boosts efficiency by leveraging selection accelerators for the Chamfer command to rapidly select edges. Copy assembly components along with their associated advanced and mechanical mates. Create a highly simplified part and make it associative to the parent part by using the Silhouette defeature method. Add a SpeedPak configuration at the top level of the assembly without needing to modify subassemblies.

Image courtesy of SolidWorks.

What user-requested enhancements are included in SolidWorks 2025?

Kumar: We’ve made hundreds of user-driven enhancements in 2024 that are delivered throughout the year. Users have been asking for a new History tab in the MySession panel, allowing users to see and track all actions performed on a model.

Users also asked for faster plastic and sheet metal design and sketching. For example, for plastic parts, you can smoothly integrate the radius parameters for a seamless blend with the new "Continuous edge blend" option for variable radius fillets. For sheet metal parts, you can automatically create customizable bend notches on the flat pattern bend line. In sketching, you can fix broken relations and dimensions due to missing references by reattaching broken sketch relations and dimensions.

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Image courtesy of SolidWorks.

Another much-requested enhancement is the ability to pattern reference geometry, such as planes and axes, which enables you to speed up skeleton model creation and build more flexible designs.

You can check the manufacturability of your designs faster with interference detection in large design review mode (LDR). Validate your design before going to manufacturing with the ability to check interference between surface bodies or surface and solid bodies.

You can speed up the creation of assemblies with the ability to copy assembly components and their associated advanced and mechanical mates. You can edit assemblies in Large Design Review mode faster with a breadcrumbs selection that makes the selection hierarchy clearer.

Will there be changes to the product portfolio?

Kumar: Yes. SolidWorks Ultimate, and the addition of NC Shop Floor Programmer to all SolidWorks packages and offers.

SolidWorks Ultimate is an end-to-end offering that builds on the tools and capabilities included with SolidWorks Premium. SolidWorks Ultimate adds cloud-based design, simulation, product lifecycle management, marketing, documentation, and manufacturing tools, enabling and accelerating seamless collaboration for any product development workflow. It offers all of these capabilities at an affordable price. By unifying design, engineering, simulation, manufacturing, and go-to-market activities, SolidWorks Ultimate helps you eliminate siloed processes, allowing rapid iteration and exceptional product delivery.

We are including NC Shop Floor Programmer in all SolidWorks packages and offers with the SolidWorks 2025 release. The advanced manufacturing solution helps you validate your manufacturing designs and run what-if scenarios with nesting. You can empower CNC programmers with access to 2D fabrication programming, 3-axis, 3+2-axis, EDM, and machine simulation to optimize tool paths before running the parts in the real world.

Will SolidWorks continue to be enhanced through multiple releases during the year?

Kumar: You no longer have to wait for an annual release to take advantage of the latest enhancements. For a couple of years now, we have been releasing new functionality throughout the year in our Service Packs (SPs) for SolidWorks with Cloud Services and Functional Deliveries (FDs) for 3DExperience SolidWorks. To access the latest enhancements, you need to update SolidWorks – whether 3DExperience SolidWorks or SolidWorks with Cloud Services. So, why wait? Our fully browser-based solutions, available in the SolidWorks Cloud Offer, everyone is on the latest release all the time.

How is the SolidWorks product strategy evolving to better respond to new market needs and technologies?

Kumar: In my current role, I get to talk to a lot of customers. I get to listen to their frustrations and pain points. I am hearing about the need to predict manufacturing costs and reduce manufacturing errors. About delays caused by planning failures. People are struggling with tools that are not working well with each other. About communication silos where data has to be translated for other systems to use it.

While these issues appear unrelated, if you look deeper, they are all symptoms of a common underlying problem, a technology problem – lack of unified access to data.

So, we enable unified access to data – regardless of whether you use 3DExperience SolidWorks, SolidWorks with Cloud Services, or the browser-based SolidWorks roles.  

The 3DExperience platform delivers unified data access by ensuring all your tools and data are in one secure place. This enables you to leverage the latest technologies such as AI and data mining in conjunction with your company data and key software applications such as SolidWorks – all available in the cloud.

This makes it possible to generate history and rules-based insights that predict what a design should look like and automate repetitive, tedious tasks. For example, have SolidWorks automatically select the edges that need to be chamfered or automatically finish your sketch. And why not automatically predict the number, size, and material of bolts required to hold the cap of a pressure vessel, then create the holes, and assemble them? The possibilities are endless when your data, applications, and innovative technologies are unified on the platform.