Sharing technical know-how and practical experience informally with each other is something we know many people using DriveWorks like to do. DriveWorks Drivers provides a platform for this, connecting DriveWorks users from around the world. The meetings feature guest speakers sharing their experiences and encouraging questions and dialogue about the technology.
Last week, we hosted our March DriveWorks Drivers meeting. The meeting ran virtually at 3pm GMT and 1pm AEDT. Hosting at different times has enabled our global community to join at a time that suits them.
Since starting DriveWorks Drivers in 2020, we have really seen the value of getting together quarterly to share knowledge from our own team as well as talk to DriveWorks users from all kinds of industries who are using DriveWorks software. We had over 150 people in attendance across both meetings – thank you to everyone who joined.
We started the meetings with a short preview on what to expect at DriveWorks World 2025. Our Product Manager – Integration, Adam Baker, delivered a presentation on integrating 3rd party solutions with DriveWorks. We were then joined by two customers who shared how they have successfully implemented DriveWorks into their engineering workflows. Paul Gimbel from the DriveWorks team delivered the results of our most recent DriveWorks Challenge and shared an informative Final Ascent segment on Managing SQL with DriveApps.
3rd party integrations with DriveWorks
DriveWorks Product Manager – Integration, Adam Baker, shared his insight on how DriveWorks technology can integrate with other company systems. Adam focused on DriveWorks’ ability to integrate with accounting, ERP & CRM software packages, and also shared how we have benefitted from integrating DriveWorks with Microsoft Dynamics for our internal processes. Adam used the updated integration technology example to demonstrate the integration capabilities of DriveWorks.
Customer Presentation: Liftech Engineering (K.L) Sdn Bhd with IME Technology Sdn Bhd
Ibrahim Bin Ridzuan, Project Engineer at Liftech Engineering in Taiping, Perak, Malaysia, shared how they use DriveWorks to design custom overhead crane systems. Ibrahim’s reseller and implementation partner, M.J. Yee from IME Technology provided some technical background into the approach used in the project. DriveWorks Drivers attendees were impressed with the level of design automation involved, the amount of time saved, and the use of calculation tables to propose design alternatives.
Customer Presentation: AirPro Fan & Blower Company
Keith Antosh is a Program Engineer at AirPro Fan & Blower Company, and a long time DriveWorks user. Keith covered a wide range of topics including their unique approach to deploying a web-based solution on DriveWorks Live, migrating from being an entirely Excel-based organization, and a fully automated process for users to request STEP output files without having to use SOLIDWORKS. Our community thoroughly enjoyed the presentation, continuing the conversation through questions in the meeting chat.
DriveWorks Challenge
Since more than a third of attendees were at their first DriveWorks Drivers meeting, Paul Gimblel explained the concept of the DriveWorks Challenge – a collection of quick DriveWorks puzzles designed to help users hone their implementation skills. The collection of eight challenges is available to the DriveWorks community to complete at any time. All challenge submissions receive a personal, comprehensive review with tips, tricks, and ways that the user can improve their implementations and their skill sets.
Congratulations to the winners, Paul Lebovits of Art Home Alu in France and DriveWorks Senior Technical Specialist, Mark Deng, for submitting the winning submissions for reimagining the use of Data Tables in DriveWorks Challenge #8. Think you can do better than our solutions? We would love to see them! Head to the MyDriveWorks Learning Portal, where you’ll find the full challenge brief, video, and winning submissions. Even though the challenge deadline has passed, we are still very happy to review your submissions and give you personal feedback.
Final Ascent – Managing SQL Data with DriveApps
We all know how easy it is to manage our contacts, customers, catalogs and much more with CPQ. But whether we use the CPQ DriveApp or not, we can still use DriveApps to manage our own external data sources, like SQL database tables. In this Final Ascent, Paul Gimbel took us on a tour of how to use the List Data Provider project template to quickly and easily enable our users to manage the data in a SQL database table.
This Final Ascent has been recorded, and is available to watch back in the MyDriveWorks Learning Portal. If you’d like to learn more on this topic, our next Tech Talks webinar on 20th March will look in more detail at managing external data with DriveApps and List Data Providers.
See you in June for the next DriveWorks Drivers meeting
Registration is now open to join us on Thursday, June 5th for our next meeting of DriveWorks Drivers which will be hosted at 1pm AEST and 3pm BST.
We host our DriveWorks Drivers meetings at two different times to reach more of our global community. Use this handy tool to convert the meeting times to your time zone and choose the best meeting time for you.