Inventor Suite 2012

[rr]

My company plans on upgrading to Autodesk Inventor 2012 and AutoCAD 2012. We have a total of 20 users of AutoCAD. 6 of those useres will also being using Inventor at the same time. So we are thinking of purchasing 6 seats of Inventor 2012 Suite (network) which we were told would come with AutoCAD. And then 14 seats of straight AutoCAD 2012 (network). I believe that this would be 2 different licenses on our servier.

Our reseller is telling us that if we open up autocad on 14 stations and then open up Inventor on 6 more stations, I would not be able to open AutoCAD on those 6 stations because all of the licenses will be used up. Is this true?

[DarrenP]

well first there is no Inventor Suite 2012 any more its called Product Design Suite Premium

yes that is true you have no licenses available if all the products are open at the same time

[Ray_Feiler]

If you buy 14 AutoCAD seats and 6 Product Design seats then you could have 20 concurrent AutoCAD sessions going.

[DarrenP]

i think i misread this

if you have all 6 Inventor Licenses used then you still have 14 autocad licenses availble

[DarrenP]

when the inventor users open autocad from the mechanical install it will use the inventor license it won't consume another license

[rr]

So just to clarify, if i am a user of Product Design Suite Premium and i have Inventor and AutoCad open at the same time, my computer is only consuming one license from the server. Which means there are 5 Product Design Suite Premium seats left and 14 AutoCAD licenses left open for use...

Your help is much appreciated...

[DarrenP]

yes that is correct

[Loren_J]

We have been working through these licensing problems recently. Technically, only ACADM is part of the Inventor suite. ACAD is included because ACADM runs on top of it. If an Inventor user starts ACADM or Inventor first, it will consume an Inventor license. If an Inventor user starts ACAD first, it will consume an ACAD license and it will hold onto the license even if Inventor is started. The only way to release the license is to close AutoCAD.

The licensing is supposed to work that way so an ACAD user doesn't take an Inventor license. My understanding is that there are two parallel licensing paths. ACAD users start with a vanilla ACAD license, if it is available, and then move to higher level licenses if they start an ACAD vertical. They will also consume a vertical license if no vanilla ACAD licenses are available. Inventor follows a similar path, with ACADM or base Inventor consuming an Inventor license. When Inventor Pro functionality is accessed, or if all of the base Inventor licenses are in use, an Inventor Pro licenses is used.

The simplest solution is to make sure the Inventor users start ACADM. Unless you have ACADM network licenses, this will automaically take an Inventor license. This was a big problem for us because we had ACADM network licenses so Inventor users would grab one of those if they started ACAD or ACADM before launching Inventor.

For Inventor 2011, you have to use an options file to direct users to specific licenses.

options file

For Inventor 2012, it looks like the situation has changed. I have heard that the options file was to make 2011 compatible with earlier versions of the licensing, so you don't need it for 2012, although that might not be true. The biggest problem with 2012 is that you have to download all of your license files on the same day and you have to concatenate the licenses. Otherwise, only the last group of licenses you install will work. This means if you buy more seats of Inventor or ACAD, you have to download all of the license files and set them up again.

I am not an IT person or a licensing expert, so some of this information may be inaccurate or incomplete. I know that our IT person, who has done our licensing for years, had to get tech support help to figure out how to do this. Also, you should do reaearch on the proper method to install the 2012 licenses. It would be great if you can respond here with more specific info. I would ask our IT guy, but he is behind schedule and grumpy right now.

Good luck,