Dear SolidWorks, Welcome to the cloud.

Today at SolidWorks World, Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, announced Product Data Sharing (PDS) as the first of the company’s online services to be available on the Enovia v6 backbone. SolidWorks definitely took a cue from social networking and online communities like LinkedIn and Facebook. Now designers can open a SolidWorks add-in and select other designers in their network to collaborate and comment on designs. The files get pushed to the cloud and the collaborator can view the model with the SolidWorks add-in or a web browser (Internet Explorer).

The browser, using a plug-in, allows collaborators to perform some common operations–they can view, rotate, slice and even comment on the design. It’s unclear at this time how licensing will work, but I’m sure we’ll hear before the service launches later this year.

Product Data Sharing sounds like a great step in helping designers and others collaborate on drawings. I can see how it can cut down on design and collaboration times, especially for team members in different locations.

[Warning: shameless marketing plug ahead]

On behalf of Arena (a long-time SolidWorks partner), I’d like to welcome SolidWorks to the cloud. It’s a fine place, even though its name changes every few years (anyone remember On-Demand? SaaS? Single-instance-multi-tenant?), and I think PDS will be very happy there. I also think our customers will find a lot of utility using this complementary cloud-based tool in conjunction with Arena collaborative BOM and change management.

[End of shameless plug]

That’s it for me from SolidWorks World 2010. Be sure to check out pictures from the event on Flickr.