topic Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th in Revit Cloud Worksharing Forum

C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 21:53:35 GMT

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Update: 5:20pmEST 10.19.2017

Subscription enforcement has been enabled for C4R.

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All,

As part of our efforts to avoid disruption amongst teams cloud worksharing in C4R, we wanted to post here to alert you all that we will restart enforcement of C4R subscription entitlement next Thursday, October 19th. Any Autodesk IDs without "Collaboration for Revit" allocated in manage.autodesk.com will be unable to browse or open cloud workshared Revit models.

The current lack of entitlement enforcement is a reaction to a defect in our entitlement back end, which was causing users with valid entitlement losing C4R access. We chose to shut off entitlement enforcement until we were confident that paid subscribers couldn't lose access. We are now confident that this cannot happen, and are executing our communication plan to minimize disruption when we re-enable the entitlement enforcement. If you or members of your team are cloud worksharing without entitlement, you likely received an email September 19th, and again this past week.

If you want to continue cloud worksharing, you need to work with your Autodesk or reseller sales partner to obtain subscription, or purchase a subscription on our eStore.

If you do not want to continue cloud worksharing, you can, before October 19th:

1. Open the project models from C4R and do a Save As and to detach and bring the models local.

2. Publish the project models to BIM 360 Team, and then download them from the website.

Please feel free to post here with any questions, as we are here to help ahead of this important deadline.

-Kyle

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 07:03:01 GMT

So are you tell us that 'every' member of the team has to NOW pay for a collaboration license and not just the host?

Even if they just contribute for a couple of days?

Lorne

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 12:23:14 GMT

Lorne,
If the team member wants to access the cloud workshared model in Revit, yes. This has always been the stated business model for C4R.

Note that 1) a C4R subscription can be re-allocated between users in manage.autodesk.com by your Contract Manager, and 2) a C4R subscription is not required for accessing the published models on BIM 360 Team.

-Kyle

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 06:53:57 GMT

Thanks for that.

We have now ended our subscription and will look at other more cost effective solutions. At £1000 per year per person it will simply cost too much. A dedicated server and VPN will be cheaper that one years subscription of collaboration for the whole team.

Autodesk should consider it's pricing structure.

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 12:23:48 GMT

Totaly agrees with Lorne,

A simple Revitserver is way more cheaper than the C4R solution from Autodesk.

We did ended our subscription too, if Autodesk comes with an affordable solution we could switch back but €1000,-/ year/person is to expensive.

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 22:11:34 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks for that.

We have now ended our subscription and will look at other more cost effective solutions. At £1000 per year per person it will simply cost too much. A dedicated server and VPN will be cheaper that one years subscription of collaboration for the whole team.

Autodesk should consider it's pricing structure.

Sorry to see you go.

-Kyle

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

angiizzi — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 19:47:32 GMT

As I totally understand your position, you should consider the cost of hosting your data on a server in your office. You will have to pay for the cost of the server, the set-up of the server sharing solution and the IT cost associated with maintaining your server. You will also not be able to work with others outside your firewall which is the most used feature of Collaboration for Revit. We provide the service for as little $2.20/ day per user.

We hate to see you leave our services but wanted to make sure we highlight the costs involved to host data especially large projects. Bringing your data to you instead of you to the data is the intent of this service which offers many Autodesk customers inefficiencies at a lower cost.

We hope that you will consider our cloud services in the future and the extended stakeholder review process the cloud offers. It was not our intent to make these services available for free but happy you were able to try it for the short time that you did enjoy it.

All the Best,

Angi Izzi

Sr. Industry Manager - Project Delivery Solutions

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 08:13:58 GMT

Hi Angi,

Thank you for this reply. Right now we outsource the hosting for our Revit servers for €85 a month per server(it is possible to work with other outside our firewall). This is per project with unlimited user. So lets say that our projects has a average of 10 users per project, that will be €0,28 per user per day. That's almost 10 times cheaper than C4R right now.

I'm a big fan of the C4R in combination with BIM360 team. But right now the financial difference is to big between the Revit server and C4R. I hope your team will reconsider the pricing of C4R.

Arjan Siebelink

BIM manager cepezed

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 08:51:07 GMT

100% agree with Arjan.

we spoke to one of the larges Architects in the UK this week and they have offices all over the world. They use their own server and have no problems at all and it is dirt cheap per user in comparison to collaboration (they have hundreds of team members). They gave us a demo and is was flawless. We have our network guys coming out tomorrow to discuss a system and costs.

I am afraid that with Autodesk hiking the prices of their software yet again (apparently 10% this November) to ask £1000 per user for collaboration is an insult.

Believe me, if we could find another options other than using Autodesk products we would explore them.

and to rub salt into our wounds Revit is not backwards compatible ... hmmm, I wonder why that is? could it be money driven?

many large builders we have spoken to are thinking about locking down to 2017 and earlier due to software costs.

Autodesk, sorry but you are too greedy. I have no problem paying a fair price for my software but you are milking the cash cow dry.

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

sebastian.ortner — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:33:55 GMT

I have to agree with the general consensus in this thread. For us, paying 265,000€/year (~250 Users both internal and external) for C4R in addition to standard Revit licenses is not feasible. As much as it pains me to say this, but we have to move back to the conventional Revit Server for our work-shared models. The pricing for C4R is completely off.

The entire lineup of Autodesk's services – including Collaboration for Revit, BIM 360 Team, etc. – along with their respective licensing systems is a complete mess! I have the feeling that Autodesk doesn't even understand how these services connect and combine, let alone how someone can properly purchase the right solution. This has become apparent in the last couple of days, when we talked to our Autodesk representatives.

Sebastian Ortner

BIM Manager

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 12:24:08 GMT

On another note.

We have been using collaboration for 8 months unaware that Autodesk were 'correcting a glitch'. We had multiple projects uploaded to our serves which were also shared with 3rd party contributors/editors.

We received the email on Friday giving us only 3 working days to pull off all our models and notify our 3rd party contributors/editors and formulate a temporary plan until we resolve this matter alternatively.

thank you Autodesk !!!!!

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 12:33:51 GMT

I had the same problem!

We're dutch office, so we did not see the email until Monday.

We had 2 days to to arrange a backup plan.

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 15:16:02 GMT

@info wrote:

On another note.

We have been using collaboration for 8 months unaware that Autodesk were 'correcting a glitch'. We had multiple projects uploaded to our serves which were also shared with 3rd party contributors/editors.

We received the email on Friday giving us only 3 working days to pull off all our models and notify our 3rd party contributors/editors and formulate a temporary plan until we resolve this matter alternatively.

thank you Autodesk !!!!!

First and foremost, we're very sorry that your team was somehow not part of our initial communication. We took every practical effort we had at our disposal to avoid that. Our goal has always been avoiding major disruption, but at the same time having a C4R product that operated against its stated business model. In an effort to illustrate those efforts, and since anybody who knows me across the more than a decade where I've been participating in the community, I'm glad to illustrate those efforts:

The underlying defect we were dealing with internally manifested itself in a way that provided an inaccurate entitlement response to C4R services when they did their entitlement calls as part of service operations. So, we stopped enforcing the entitlement responses, even though we were still recording them. Because of that defect, we could not be 100% confident that our analytics around unentitled users was accurate until after the defect was fixed. That "fix" date was September 4th, after which we were confident that we had a clear picture of who was running unentitled, based on the aforementioned analytics.
Our communication started with a 30 day notice window to those running unentitled, followed by a 7 day notice that coincided with forum posts like this. In parallel to this was an effort to work with reseller partners and direct Autodesk sales to proactively communicate with companies running without entitlement. All of this starts with knowing who was actually using the service unentitled.
So, we started building the dataset of active users who were running unentitled starting September 4th, and sent out a mass email on September 19th providing notice to the set of users running unentitled between September 4th and September 14th (there was some post-processing required before the email went out). 1,000s our users received that first email. Employees of customers with a direct sales relationship with Autodesk did not receive emails, as the account teams were tasked with directly reaching out to those customers.
That list was also provided to sales teams, who initiated a communication plan.
Fast forward to last week, we generated another list that contained the unentitled users from a sample of September 19th-October 9th. 1,000s of users received that email as well.
Last Saturday we posted to both this forum and RevitForums to provide another set of warnings.
As we've moved closer to the entitlement date, it's become clear that a number of our customers who were committed to C4R usage needed additional time to avoid disruption, so we've added a number of them to a temporary whitelist, which defers entitlement checking on their known entitled users, while they worked our ordering and entitlement provision.
Which brings us to where we sit today, a few hours away from when our team will flip the switch on entitlement enforcement, 30 days after initial notice, and within the practical limits of our abilities.

Hopefully you agree that our efforts align with the stated goals, we've certainly done our best. If those best efforts have fallen short of your expectations, we apologize.

-Kyle

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

dtpeter2901 — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 15:49:57 GMT

I do have one other follow up question.

I think we have 90+ seats or something like that of C4R.

As one of the early adopters, (Dec 2014 If I remember right. Right after it was introduced at AU) the Licensing for this product has always been somewhat of a mess. Once you paid for your hub you were allowed to invite others to the hub where your project data was posted. Then a while back Autodesk Changed their policy. If I start a new project now, and I want to invite other consultants or Clients (remember our clients are already paying for the data we produce....) they have to purchase a Hub license (or what ever the heck it's called these days....SkyScraper, A360, BIM360.....) in order to view the data. I understand that it's relatively cheap to do that, but still. I'm paying a ton over here to host it. I should be able to allow others access without making them jump thru hoops. Nuff said. On to the next point.

The first few projects I worked on with C4R were good. I like the product. But now we're seeing a big change. Many of our consultants won't actively work on their portion of the project on C4R. They just upload a new model once a week. With is disheartening, since the point is to work together and not in their only little silo. Part of the reason they do this is the price. It's expensive. Prior to C4R, I worked on a project, with 5 other firms, built from 90+ models. Some of those firms (including the one I work for) had several office locations working on that project. We accomplished this by using a lot of Remote Desktop connections back to the one central office for the Arch files. We exchanged all of the files using SFTP and rsync. So everyone was able to exchange models 4 times a day. We hit a few snags once in a while, but overall it worked well. We already owned the Ftp server so cost to the project team was Zero. Well almost zero. We had to pay for power and cooling. We had about 200 people in total working on that project for almost 2yrs. Cost to the project team if we would have been C4R would have been in the neighborhood of $320k if we bought yearly licenses. I mention this process because it works and I own my own data.

We played around with Revit Server for Inter Office collaboration. Imagine trying to update that many models and reloading them on a daily basis. My guess is that's one FTE for the duration. Plus you have to buy and maintain the hardware. RDP machines cost money too. We figure $2400 for the workstation, which gets refreshed every 3yrs. Do the math on that solution and you end up about $800 per year. Or the cost of a seat of C4R. So we started to go that way, even for just inter office collaboration. Our employees liked it much better than RDP.

We touted that we had C4R and got our partners to say they were going to use it during come project interviews, which helped us to win some work. Only to have those same partners just upload weekly and not work on it.

On to the next point (one which Autodesk Really does need to address, and frankly should be a rather simple solution), Permissions.

I want the ability to have my contractors pull a post model off the Hub. In order to do that I need to give them editor permissions. Problem is those same permissions apply if you have a C4R license. So my contractor, owner or anyone that I invite to the project and give the ability to pull models, can also go in and make changes in the live model on the C4R side. That's unacceptable in my mind. I also want to have ownership of my model. I don't want my consults making changes in my models. Buzzsaw works this way. Why can't C4R?

I have a longer list, but those are my heavy hitters. If Autodesk wants to continue to get our yearly check for about $70k you have some work to do. I won't even mention the down time, model corruption issues, the lack of automation to publish model, or any of the other growing pains we've experience while being out on this Bleeding Edge.

I do want to say thanks to Kyle and Adam for being patient listeners thru all the wondering rants I've come up with. But I still give C4R a "Needs Improvement" ranking.

Wait, I forgot to ask my actual question.

Will my older projects that were supposed to be grandfathered be affected for those that we've invited but don't have a Hub licenses.

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 15:56:49 GMT

@sebastian.ortner wrote:

I have to agree with the general consensus in this thread. For us, paying 265,000€/year (~250 Users both internal and external) for C4R in addition to standard Revit licenses is not feasible. As much as it pains me to say this, but we have to move back to the conventional Revit Server for our work-shared models. The pricing for C4R is completely off.

The entire lineup of Autodesk's services – including Collaboration for Revit, BIM 360 Team, etc. – along with their respective licensing systems is a complete mess! I have the feeling that Autodesk doesn't even understand how these services connect and combine, let alone how someone can properly purchase the right solution. This has become apparent in the last couple of days, when we talked to our Autodesk representatives.

Sebastian Ortner

BIM Manager

Sebastian,

We built C4R because of the clear need in the market for project teams to deliver BIM projects in a more efficient, connected way. We priced it based on the tradeoff value of hardware and employee costs to operate alternative solutions, and the relative improvement of team's efficiency when compared to those alternative solutions. That cost does depend on the scale of the purchase as well, and the numbers you posted for price are inaccurate by a significant margin. We'll be reaching out to you to make sure you have a clear picture of the costs for such a subscription to C4R.

With accurate pricing, a significant number of our customers agree with the value of C4R, and are happily subscribing to the service so their project teams can realize that value. If that value calculus doesn't add up for you or others, we value the feedback, and your purchasing decisions - or lack thereof - go a long way to influencing the go-to-market decisions we make. We're always glad to have that conversation, learn, and make sure C4R continues to be the best option for multi-firm, global BIM authoring.

As this is a thread about the entitlement enforcement change, that conversation is a little off topic though, so would kindly request we take it over to another thread. We're glad to continue it over there.

-Kyle

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 21:45:53 GMT

Update: Subscription enforcement is now enabled for C4R.

-Kyle

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 22:35:24 GMT

Kyle,

How long does it take for the subscription enforcement to recognize a user that was already in the BIM360 portal but had no account in the management.autodesk.com site, but was then added and assigned a C4R license, to be able to access A360 again? I came on this info late but am now trying to get a user back on the project. We have the licenses, I've just assigned them. User has logged out and back in multiple times to no avail. Am I doing something wrong?

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 23:01:15 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

Kyle,

How long does it take for the subscription enforcement to recognize a user that was already in the BIM360 portal but had no account in the management.autodesk.com site, but was then added and assigned a C4R license, to be able to access A360 again? I came on this info late but am now trying to get a user back on the project. We have the licenses, I've just assigned them. User has logged out and back in multiple times to no avail. Am I doing something wrong?

It can take up to 2 hours for the entitlement allocation to sync between manage.autodesk.com and the entitlement service that C4R calls. However, having that user log into manage.autodesk.com should force the sync and get them back up and running. If that's not happening, send me a private message with the user's email address and I'll have the team take a look.

-Kyle

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

Basam.Yousif — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 12:02:26 GMT

This was POORLY EXECUTED. No one knew about it. Entire projects are being taken off C4R as we speak. I know of two so far.

Re: C4R Subscription Enforcement Starts October 19th

KyleB_Autodesk — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 12:56:00 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
This was POORLY EXECUTED. No one knew about it. Entire projects are being taken off C4R as we speak. I know of two so far.

Apologies that you and the teams you work with were somehow not included in the communication plan that we executed ahead of this action. As a reseller partner of Autodesk, I know for certain that your organization was part of numerous communications that we made, but it sounds like you personally were not made aware of the changes.

As I said earlier, we made every practical effort we could to alert the C4R user base who were using the service unentitled. But we are always open to learn how we can do a better job. What additional actions would you have hoped we did as part of the communication plan we executed?

-Kyle