Autodesk

7 years ago

Nightmare is the right word. Of all the software vendors, I find AutoDesk the worst to manage. We have several teams with different subscription dates and like you they have different portal access. Snow can help a lot with this nightmare if you give yourself a nice breadcrumb trail. Essentially I use a combination of licenses and agreements. First I set up an AutoCAD agreement in Snow for each team. That agreement contains the details for each renewal period etc but most importantly, the description field details who the agreement is for, the account number and the registered portal credential to access that account. That detail used to be kept in spreadsheets and emails and I can't even begin to explain how much easier putting this into Snow made managing this. Then I add any purchased AutoCAD licenses, match the purchase date to the agreement period and then attach the license to the agreement - voila. With every renewal you just update the agreement periods, attach any licensing documents to the new license and you have your full audit history for AutoCAD in Snow. Your perpetual licenses don't need to be attached to any agreement of course. They can be easily identified at a glance though as I believe the last version to be perpetual was 2013? So anything above that should be a subscription (please correct me if I'm wrong.) I think Snow is a little bit screwy with the network licenses though. We have some network licenses added as network licenses but we show no installs of network licenses. I believe this is because the exe is the same and it uses the same installer, the only difference is at the point if install you change the product to network license and point it to the server. Compliance isn't really an issue though as long as you have controlled access to the portals. Fortunately, I manage the portals and access because to the licenses has to be granted through the portal, unauthorised users are prevented from using the product anyway. Bit long-winded sorry, hope it helps.

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Portal User
7 years ago
Welcome to the nightmare of Autodesk. Have a look at this: We are now a truly subscription Token-Flex organisation and it took some effort to get there We now are fully compliant (thanks to the ability of Snow to provide the reports required) and we have a much easier time managing this. Mark
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- PeteS
  7 years ago
  Thanks Mark, appreciate the info.
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ScouseSAM
7 years ago
Nightmare is the right word. Of all the software vendors, I find AutoDesk the worst to manage. We have several teams with different subscription dates and like you they have different portal access. Snow can help a lot with this nightmare if you give yourself a nice breadcrumb trail. Essentially I use a combination of licenses and agreements. First I set up an AutoCAD agreement in Snow for each team. That agreement contains the details for each renewal period etc but most importantly, the description field details who the agreement is for, the account number and the registered portal credential to access that account. That detail used to be kept in spreadsheets and emails and I can't even begin to explain how much easier putting this into Snow made managing this. Then I add any purchased AutoCAD licenses, match the purchase date to the agreement period and then attach the license to the agreement - voila. With every renewal you just update the agreement periods, attach any licensing documents to the new license and you have your full audit history for AutoCAD in Snow. Your perpetual licenses don't need to be attached to any agreement of course. They can be easily identified at a glance though as I believe the last version to be perpetual was 2013? So anything above that should be a subscription (please correct me if I'm wrong.) I think Snow is a little bit screwy with the network licenses though. We have some network licenses added as network licenses but we show no installs of network licenses. I believe this is because the exe is the same and it uses the same installer, the only difference is at the point if install you change the product to network license and point it to the server. Compliance isn't really an issue though as long as you have controlled access to the portals. Fortunately, I manage the portals and access because to the licenses has to be granted through the portal, unauthorised users are prevented from using the product anyway. Bit long-winded sorry, hope it helps.
Expand Post