topic Ways to automate assigning licenses? in Education Installation, Licensing & Administration Forum (Read-only)

Ways to automate assigning licenses?

sundermannc — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 01:58:30 GMT

Hello,

K-12 Systems Administrator here. I use various automation methods to automate our software license allocations for our products. We currently use site licenses for our Autodesk products that I update yearly. I'm now reading that these are going to be discontinued in 2026 and we need to move to named user licensing. We went through this some years ago with Adobe. I was concerned at first, but then found Adobe has a tool to connect to our Active Directory that provisions users to licenses based on AD groups. Once we got this set up, we just add/remove users from AD groups and the licenses are applied/removed. It works great.

I'm not seeing any specific tools for this on the Autodesk information here:

https://www.autodesk.com/education/support

The only thing I see is how you can manually apply/remove licenses.

Is there a way to connect this licensing to something like Clever, OneRoster or even do it like we do with Adobe and use Active Directory?

Thank you for any guidance you have.

Re: Ways to automate assigning licenses?

mdavis22569 — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:49:28 GMT

Hi @sundermannc

Have you seen the following:

https://www.autodesk.com/support/account/admin/users/assign-access

Assign users in bulk

Prepare a CSV file listing the users you want to import and assign.
- Add a single row for each user.
- Add three columns: First name, Last name, and Email address.
- Users that already have access to this product will not be assigned another seat.
Sign into Autodesk account at manage.autodesk.com.
Select User Management > By Product.
Select a team and a product.

Something like this?

Click Assign Users.
If you don't want to assign all included items, click Customize, then select or de-select individual items.
Select the Import To Assign tab and click Upload CSV File. You can continue working while the file is uploading. A notification displays when the import is complete.

Re: Ways to automate assigning licenses?

sundermannc — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:07:27 GMT

Thanks for the reply. I did see that, but that's like managing something with how it was done in the '90s. lol

We automate a lot of things in our environment as kids come and go. While using a CSV is fine initially.... The constant changes we see add "one more thing" we need to do... When the "right" way is to automate it, it feels like a step backward to have to use CSVs... Especially with every other large company we work with either syncs to classes via something like Clever or our Active Directory groups.

It's a shame there isn't a way to do this from Autodesk. It's funny because their emailed annoucement says "This shift allows us to better support the needs of modern educational environments and ensure that students and educators can work seamlessly across multiple devices and locations."....... But yet, it doesn't actually support the needs of "modern education environments". If it did, they would surely provide connection to something for automatic rostering.