Q: How do I remove watermarks from SolidWorks files?

• Why are my SolidWorks files watermarked?
• I just saved a SolidWorks file with the student version and now it has this annoying watermark/popup on it. How do I remove that?

Context

Under the MIT/SolidWorks Enterprise agreement, MIT received "Research Compatible" versions of the Educational Edition for use by students and Network shared Research Licenses for Faculty and Staff. The Research Compatible licensed versions were supposed to be free of the standard Educational Edition Watermarks that had been identified by the MIT stakeholders as a major pain point.

SolidWorks (aka Dassault Systems) agreed to periodically remove the watermarks from MIT files. Time to implement the watermark free Educational Editions significantly exceeded original estimates by SolidWorks, so they have also offered a temporary work around to enable the Research Network Licensed versions that faculty and staff use to be able to remove the watermarks from files. MIT has confirmed the functionality is included in SolidWorks 2015 SP2 that came out at the end of February. The functionality is only available with the MIT Network licensed Research Edition.

Answer

Option 1: Batch Processing by Dassault Systems (SolidWorks)

Working on developing Batch Process - last updated 2/24/2015

If you have a need to remove watermarks from SolidWorks 2014 or older files, please contact Software Distribution so that we can build a list to notify when we have the initial process worked out for batch processing.

Option 2: Clean up with Research Edition

Saving a file with SolidWorks 2015 to remove the watermark (or for other reasons) will update the file version to 2015 and it will not be usable with SolidWorks 2014, which is the current student version until July 2015. If you need to continue to work with files on SolidWorks 2014, please consult the Batch processing instructions above.

Contact your faculty or local staff that have the Research Edition Network license and ask them to re-save the file with SolidWorks 2015 SP2 or later before sending to an outside firm for production. Saving the file with SolidWorks 2015 SP2 Research Edition at MIT will scrub the watermark from the parts file, but will result in a file that can only be opened by SolidWorks 2015 or later.

Dassault Systems is expected to release the Educational Edition of SolidWorks 2015 in June 2015 and IS&T will make it available as quickly as possible.