Last night we had our 2nd meeting of 2010 and what a great meeting it was.  We had somewhere around 40 users in attendance, which included a good number of new faces which is always great to see.  The meeting was once again hosted at the Haworth Inn & Conference Center in downtown Holland, MI on the campus of Hope College.  This location has been a true blessing for our group as they take care of the setup, takedown, and of course the great pizza.

We started our meeting off with some general announcements which included all of the places on the web that the WMSWUG has a presence.  Also, we gave a run down of the new Email Notifications tool that our group is going to be using instead of Fred’s master Excel sheet.  Along with the new way of tracking members of our group, we announced that we are hoping to send out a newsletter to all of the members on the off months that we do not have a meeting.  A couple of notes from the rest of the updates presentation are…

• SWUGN Technical Summit in Chicago, IL
  • $40.00 to attend for a 1 day SolidWorks WORLD
  • Tentatively scheduled for May 25, 2010
• The WMSWUG was 1 of 4 finalists for the User Group of the Year award at SolidWorks WORLD
  • What a great accomplishment for our group and it is all because of YOU, the attendees, that make this group what it is.
• It looks like a special guest will be attending our meeting sometime in the end of June or the beginning of July (hopefully at our scheduled July 13, 2010 meeting).

After we wrapped up the short updates portion the meeting was turned over to Chris Peterson & Dean Anderson, both of Wolverine World Wide.  They did an AWESOME presentation on everything that happened at SolidWorks WORLD 2010 in Anaheim, CA.  They did such a great job that I think that they just signed themselves up for doing our groups yearly SolidWorks WORLD report.  I will not say much about their presentation (because the PowerPoint will be posted on our Downloads page soon) other than that they mixed in a ton of humor to their presentation.  It was great and thanks guys!

After a short break Brian Gilson from Aromech did a presentation called “Whiteboard Sketching in SolidWorks”.  In this presentation he covered how to use SolidWorks sketches and blocks to simulate cam paths and how cylinders work together by using blocks.  He showed how this functionality can be used to replace the good old notepad or napkin that we normally use to come up with our designs.  I am hoping (and will encourage) Brian will do a write up in one of our upcoming newsletters on this topic seeing how I don’t have a PowerPoint or anything to post from his presentation.

Like I said, this was a great meeting and it was nice to see everyone again.  Our next meeting is scheduled for May 11, 2010 at the same place.  Stay tuned for more details about this meeting.

One last thing, our group is what it is because of you, the end users.  Because of this, I would love to see more of our members do short technical presentations at our meetings or just give a presentation on what kind of products you design and how you do it.  If you are interested in doing this, please send Fred Egge or Jason Raak an email and we will put you on the schedule.  Oh and by the way, if you present, you get 1st chance at choosing a giveaway that SolidWorks provides our group.