I would like to initiate some intelligent discussion here about some serious issues we are seeing with the media delivered to many schools for the Autodesk Design Academy 2013 English Suite. We believe the condition occurs when the suite is installed as preconfigured with all products selected. When AutoCAD Architecture is attempting to be installed it looks to be conflicting with AutoCAD basic version already installed then rolls back the installation from that point. We have verified that AutoCAD Architecture will install alone where no other AutoCAD product exists. That is not the problem. The problem for us is to be able to install all of the AutoCAD based products in the ADA (AutoCAD basic, Architecture, Mechanical, Electrical and Civil 3D) and have them behave correctly when opened. We can get one extended application and basic to run, but no one has been able to get two extended products to run and basic. Most clients getting AutoCAD Architectural to install are missing all of their AEC content in standalone installations. Some clients uninstalled AutoCAD and then Mechanical installed fine but then couldn’t install Architecture. We are getting reports of installation issues with AutoCAD Mechanical too.. Some clients everything installs great, and then when they deploy the products all of the AEC content is missing from the AutoCAD Architecture. To manually make repairs to every computer is a huge task as some of these schools have hundreds of seats in multiple physical locations. Here are some of the complaints in our customers words..
“I have created the deployment package and I have also installed from the flash drive directly to the local machine. Both work, but the deployment package is missing the Autodesk Architecture AEC Content. I am getting an error that the file is missing.”
“The entire site license of AutoCAD Architecture 2013 for our school is not working properly. We cannot get to the content browser or use tools commonly found on the tool palette such as walls and windows. We have also had a problem with the program corrupting files created on older versions. If a file is opened in AutoCAD Architecture 2013 that was created in a previous version, the newer program does not recognize the walls and other components. This has caused us to lose days’ worth of work because once the file is opened in the newer version; it cannot be repaired in the older version.”
“The issue being that the student version downloaded at my home is much different that the version that is on my student computers, at school. There are tool bars and displays that are missing on the version downloaded at school, as part of the Autodesk Suite”
Our Application Engineers here have many open cases to which we have attached appropriate logs etc. but in opening these cases individuall we are encountering the mindset of “As soon as you emailed a suggestion to the end user, I put my tests on hold.” Other cases are placed on hold until the customers can provide very specific log files. These techs have fulltime responsibilities to their schools and are having trouble spending additional time to run all these tests and try to fix these issues. This is not their responsibility it is ours. I personally spent an hour and a half on hold at the Partner Technical Support line trying to gain more insight in what we can do to further assist our clients with these issues and finally hung up so here I am. Lets talk about whats going on here. Is there someone who can spend time to replicate these failures to produce these logs and findings you need so that burden is not placed on the shoulders of already unhappy customers?
