FlexLm Licensing Question

[steveGilchrist]

We use FlexLm to control the licensing of Autodesk products and make use of the cascading license capability. We have a large number of Inventor Suite 2008 licenses and so anyone using AutoCAD will effectively use an Inventor license. Does anyone know if it is possible using an option file to allow a user to use AutoCAD but prevent them from using the other Inventor Suite components ?

[TravisNave]

Are you wanting AutoCAD users to only use an AutoCAD license and not Inventor? Or to be able to use an Inventor license, but not run Inventor itself? What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

[Anonymous]

> We use FlexLm to control the licensing of Autodesk products and make use
> of the cascading license capability.
> We have a large number of Inventor Suite 2008 licenses and so anyone using
> AutoCAD will effectively use an
> Inventor license. Does anyone know if it is possible using an option file
> to allow a user to use AutoCAD
> but prevent them from using the other Inventor Suite components ?

You can "blacklist" individual users or create groups of users which don't
get permission to use the individual packages.
However this requires that they are licensed with each individual feature
names.

Please be more specific and we can help you much better.

Best regards,

Henrik Goldman
---

Flexlm license management to reduce your costs -
http://www.x-formation.com/license_statistics/index.html

Our blog on software license management - http://blog.x-formation.com/

Protect your software with LM-X License Manager -
http://www.x-formation.com/lm-x_license_manager/index.html

[steveGilchrist]

Many thanks for you replies.

Here is the exact requirement:

The CAD department want the I.S. department to create a single build for all of the CAD PCs and hence the PCs will come with all of the CAD software installed.

They then want to use FlexLm to determine which users are allowed to use the installed software. Currently most of the licenses are for packages e.g. Inventor Suite 2008 and so someone using a CAD PC to solely use AutoCAD would take up 1 Inventor Suite 2008 license to run it. This works well.

However, the CAD department have asked whether they can further restrict the users by preventing them from using other components of the package from which they obtained the license (in the above example another component of the Inventor Suite). One of the reasons for this is to stop users from using products that they have not been trained in, as the training is necessary to ensure that they adhere to the corporate standards.

I have had a look at the FlexLm documentation and I can't see how this can be done without having a mixture of individual product licenses and Suite licenses. However, before I report back to the CAD department I just wanted to ensure that my findings were correct.

[TravisNave]

You could create an adskflex.opt options file to segregate who can and can't use licenses. However, Inventor and Mechanical Desktop (and Vanilla AutoCAD from this suite) will always use an Inventor license. Regular vanilla AutoCAD from its own media will use its own AutoCAD license.

AutoCAD will not use Inventor licenses unless you lauch the AutoCAD icon from the Inventor suite.

[steveGilchrist]

That is precisely the confirmation I needed.
Many thanks for you help in this matter.