Rental and Inventor project teams

[carnivalboy]

We originally saw rental as a good option for when we take on temporary staff (say, for a 6-month project). However, I'm shocked to see that you can only rent the current version. If we have a permanent team of five using Inventor 2013 (with perpetual licences), and then want to bring someone in temporarily and rent a copy of Inventor, we can only rent 2014. Since you can't mix different versions of Inventor, we're screwed.

We can get around this by upgrading everyone in the team to 2014. But then when the rental expires, and we wish to renew for another term, we'll likely have to renew at 2015. We can't keep upgrading the whole team dependent on rental dates, it would be chaos. Furthermore, we use an engineering document management system that only qualifies support for Inventor around 6 months after a new version is released, so we can't simply upgrade to the latest version of Inventor everytime a rental is required, even if we wanted to.

Worse still, if we decided to take on an additional temp half way through the project, so we took out an extra rental, that rental may have to be for 2015, whilst our existing temp is still only half way through his rental of 2014.

How do other teams deal with these issues?

[carnivalboy]

Anyone?

[JoAnn_Hogan]

Why dont you have a look at the subscription option? So you pay a small amout every month and then you get your new upgrade for free. That might be the best option

[carnivalboy]

Buying a licence with subscription is about four times more expensive than renting for 6 months.

[JoAnn_Hogan]

I am talking about subscription for your permanent staff, then rental would always be on the same verison as permanent staff

[carnivalboy]

Ah, I see. Our permanent staff are all on subscription, but it's not simple or desirable to have to rollout new versions to the entire team everytime we take out a rental agreement for temporary staff. 

[JoAnn_Hogan]

If you already have the subscription and new software. I would suggest that you keep your software updated. So everytime you receive your new software, install it imediately. It is one day per year you take to keep your drawing office up to date. It also means that you get your support from Autodesk every month and never get left behind

[carnivalboy]

In our case, we use an engineering document management system that only qualifies support for Inventor around 6 months after a new version is released, so we can't simply upgrade to the latest version of Inventor everytime a rental is required, even if we wanted to.

Plus, are you entitled to an upgrade part way through a rental? For example, if we took out a 6 month rental now, it would be for Inventor 2014. But would we be able to upgrade that to 2015 upon it's release next month as part of our rental agreement?

[JoAnn_Hogan]

I think that is information you should receive from your VAR.

As far as I know you can have a rental agreement for 3 months or 12 months. Your AutoCAD's and LT packages will come out in May and the Suites will only come out in July.

But I think you should ask Autodesk. I am not 100% sure how exactly it works