Carl - I just finished an 18 month investigation into both Silma's CimStation Inspection and Origin's Checkmate offline programming software. Both companies gave demos and were extremely professional. Without boring you with all the details, I recommended Silma's CSI to upper management for the final approval, while turning in a higher quoted price for CSI vs Checkmate. Management went with my recommendation and CSI is supposed to ship to us today. The primary reason that I decided against Checkmate was the fact that it's built on top of AutoDesk's AutoCAD and if I'm not mistaken, requires an additional addon (Mechanical Desktop) from AutoDesk. I don't have anything against AutoDesk personally, but I can't ignore the fact that a program that is built on top of others is just asking for problems, eventually. This is based on working with thousands of applications on no less than 2 Operating Systems over a period of about 18 years. My advice... Do your homework! Ask lots of questions related to your particular needs. Make sure you have someone highly qualified to research what you're intending to buy. Also, order the free demo CD of CSI; it'll knock your socks off. Feel free to email me with any questions you might have.

Shane