[kgargiulo]

Originally Posted by deheer_j

Is it better to support/augment what the school is already teaching them or is it better to use a tool that people are actually using in the mechanical design world? Don't get me wrong, I am an inventor fan-boy, but my industry experience as an engineering consultant proves that, in general, large, established companies use Creo, smaller, younger comapnies use SolidWorks, and a very small handful use Inventor.

As a side note, GrabCAD's support of Inventor 2015 is abysmal. It's effectively no better than GIT or Dropbox, imho. Which is another reason to switch to solid works, unless Autodesk could make a cloud version of Vault available (like Windchill) [HINT HINT].

I think it is best to expose them to a wide variety of engineering tools and processes. If you can make a part on a mill or with a plasma cutter, why not learn both and understand the pros and cons of each approach. If they can learn Inventor and Creo and learn where there is a market for each skill set then they should learn both.

Why wait for Autodesk or D'Assault to duplicate Windchill or provide it to FIRST teams for free (I hope you are not holding your breath) when Windchill itself can handle all of that and has been available for free for years? Even if all you do is use Creo's native multi CAD funcatonality as a means of either converting or simply loading non-Creo CAD into Windchill you'd be far ahead.

Nothing out there touches Creo (particularly 3.0) in terms of being able to handle heterogeneous CAD source files in their native forms directly in Creo, with more or less full access to modeling features.

Creo 3 multi CAD features