Adding a PDM Vault View with a Windows Azure Active Directory Account
When running the “View Setup” wizard to setup a PDM vault view (Create a Local Vault View for SOLIDWORKS PDM), you might run into errors such as “No authority could be contacted for authentication.” or “The Archive Server could not open the Windows Registry.” These errors happen if your account can’t feed the correct credentials into the system to complete the vault view setup.
If your account is already an Admin, commonly the error is caused when the account is setup as a Microsoft Azure Active Directory Account (An easy way to tell if your account is setup this way is if you use an email address as your username to log into your Windows profile).
There are a few ways to get around these permission errors:
Option 1: Script the Vault View Setup
• If you have many users that need to have vault views setup and they all experience this problem. It will be beneficial to script the view setup to speed up the process and this can bypass the permissions errors caused by the Microsoft Azure Activate Directory Account. To do this, follow the instructions here: Create PDM Vault View Using Script
Option 2: Run the Vault View Setup as a Different User
• If there is another admin account that isn’t a Microsoft Azure Active Directory Account on your machine, then you can run the setup as a different user. If you don’t have this account setup, continue to Option 3. If you do have another admin account, follow the steps below:
- To run the view setup as a different user, navigate to the “ViewSetup.exe” application. The default location is C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS PDM
- Hold down “Shift” and right click the “ViewSetup.exe” application and select “Run as different user” and log in with the necessary credentials.
3. Follow the typical steps to setup your Vault View Create a Local Vault View for SOLIDWORKS PDM
Option 3: Create a Temporary Local Admin Account and Create the View Setup from that Profile
• To create a temporary local admin account, perform the following steps:
- Open “Computer Management” (Search for it in your Windows Search Bar)
- Expand the “Local Users and Groups” Section and open the “Users” Folder
- Right-click in the blank space and select “New User…”
4. Create the credentials to make the new account
5. Add the user to the Administrator Group by going to the “Groups” Folder and double clicking the “Administrators” Group
6. Click “Add…” and in the dialog box enter the name of the user that you just created and select “Check Names” for it to automatically add the computer name to the front of the username you entered. Click OK to confirm the changes.
7. Now log out of the account and log into the newly created local admin account. In the login page, you will most likely have to add “.\” in front of your username to specify that you are logging into a local account (For example, if the profile that you just created was named “tempAdmin” for the login username you would put “.\tempAdmin”)
8. Follow the regular steps to add the Local Vault View Create a Local Vault View for SOLIDWORKS PDM. Make sure that during setup you select the option to make the local views accessible “For all users on this computer (requires local administrator rights”
9. You can now log back into your regular account and the vault view should be visible. If you want to remove the admin account that you just created, you can go back into the “Computer Management” application and under the Users section delete the new user.
If you are still having errors when setting up the vault view and you purchased your PDM subscription through MLC CAD Systems, feel free to reach out to us and we would be happy to assist and troubleshoot further.