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Delay acquisition of a network license

Delay acquisition of a network license

In both HSMWorks and Inventor HSM, as soon as the CAD application launches it pulls a license for the HSM CAM add-in. This makes managing the network license a real pain in the butt.

 

In scenarios where a company has 1 HSM multi-user subscription, for their 6 designers to use with their pre-existing installations of Solidworks and Inventor, the first user to launch their CAD application immediately takes the CAM license. Then the employee who actually needs to use the license has to ask everyone to close their CAD applications, or somehow find out who has the license and ask them to shutdown or unload the CAM addin.

 

It's not a nice thing to have to go through. Currently the only way to manage this is to go into the Inventor or Solidworks Add-in manager and stop the add-in from loading on startup. So everytime someone wants to use CAM they have to go into that menu, enable the add-in wait for the delay for all the toolbars to load then start using the product.

 

Multi-user licenses are more expensive than single user licenses, but the end user experience is far worse in most design/programming/machining environments where CAD seats of Inventor or Solidworks already exist. 

 

I would like to see the add-in only request a license when the user tries to create or edit any non HSM(E)Xpress toolpaths or setups.... or even just when they try to edit or create anything in the HSM environment. There might be a delay at that point, but if there is just pop up a notification overlay stating that it's getting a license from the server. Please Please fix/improve this experience.

25 Comments
HansGrootegoed
Participant

Very good point Scott!

 

ivan.stanojevic
Advisor

Must agree with Scott!

There is also an issue when the customer has got both HSM premium and HSM ultimate network licenses.

He does not have an option to choose between those two licenses when he opens for example Inventor.

He will always be given the stronger license, in this case, the ultimate one. What if he does not want to use the ultimate license?

Mainly because there is another guy who wants to use it, and he is in another room or in front of the machine.

So, in that case, this other guy has to open Inventor first..

Maybe we need to have two types of add-ins in this case.. Just thinking out loud.

 

jeff.pek
Community Manager

@ivan.stanojevic: This is something we're talking about handling via an environment variable (or maybe an in-product option, similar to the language setting), where the user can choose to use one or the other. 

 

Doing this dynamically is tricky, because it's not just about accessing advanced strategy commands, but also about enabling certain capabilities (e.g., tool orientation) within strategies, or just editing existing operations (e.g., 5-axis).

 

Jeff

scottmoyse
Mentor
Yes I agree totally Ivan. Jeff an environment variable is too awkward to get to 'on the fly'. There needs to be some kind of in product option to switch into ultimate mode as you suggest.
jeff.pek
Community Manager

I'm open to any ideas you have of how that might work.

ivan.stanojevic
Advisor

In-product option would be a good choice.

jeff.pek
Community Manager

Is that just what you're talking about, Scott? Or something more "smart"/dynamic?

  Jeff

narzinskin
Advocate

In Inventor...you can set all of the 6 users in your example to not automatically load HSM.  it will not pull the hsm license until it is loaded.  I agree with ivan though on the option to chose premium vs ultimate.

2017-06-07_12-26-50.jpg2017-06-07_12-29-49.jpg2017-06-07_12-31-36.jpg

scottmoyse
Mentor

@narzinskin Yes. I identified that as the only viable workaround currently available, and that it's a really poor experience for the user. Hence why I created this Idea.

lenny_1962
Advisor

@scottmoyse

 

This is how it works for any add in inside of SolidWorks, 3rd party or even SW ones, since well since I can remember and I have Desen using it since SW97+.

 

when I worked for the SW VAR, we'd have customers with network seats of SW standard, Pro and premium all on the same lisence and if some one had started a premium one first ,cause they only had one seat to 5 standard and 2 pro seats, the guys would have to go ask the person to shut it down and make sure they turned off open at start up.

 

so though you may get this in the Inventor side drought it will happen on SW's side.sorry

jeff.pek
Community Manager

FWIW, whatever we do for Inventor in this regard, we would also do for HSMWorks.

  Jeff

lenny_1962
Advisor

won't hold my breath on that since AD no longer gets the source code from SW like HSMWorks did when they were a Gold Partner.

jeff.pek
Community Manager
Status changed to: Accepted
 
jeff.pek
Community Manager

Let me describe what we're planning to do, to see if you would find it acceptable:

 

- Introduce a new option to allow the user to control which level (Express, Premium or Ultimate) the addin (HSMWorks and Inventor HSM) would start in. 

- This would determine which license, if any, the product tries to use.

- If this option is changed, it would take effect on next startup.

- It would probably not be a good idea to use this in a non-network-licensing scenario, as you'd have to reactivate.

 

Thoughts?

  Jeff

scottmoyse
Mentor
I think that works as long as the setting/it's location is clearly visible or communicated to the user so they know what's going on. At least there will be a mechanism to ensure for the most part a lower level license is used first.

Given express doesn't use a network license would this work switching between express and premium/ultimate?

If the only license left on the server is Ultimate and you're set to premium, I'm guessing it wouldn't find a license?
jeff.pek
Community Manager

This gets tricky in a hurry, especially if you're not using network licensing. We would include a warning that this should really only be used in network licensing scenarios, which, unfortunately, we can't detect ahead of time.

 

At the moment, I'm thinking that we would allow switching down to Express, but the problem with that is that real Express installs don't have the licensing bits, so wouldn't be able to move up to try to use a Premium or Ultimate license. I'm thinking that maybe we could change that, to potentially allow in situ upgrades to one of the paid tiers.

 

If you're set to Premium, and only an Ultimate license is left, it will "cascade" up to the Ultimate license.

 

Jeff

scottmoyse
Mentor
Sounds like a plan!
jeff.pek
Community Manager

We'll see what we can actually do. First cut may only allow switching between Premium and Ultimate.

ivan.stanojevic
Advisor

Fair enough.

jeff.pek
Community Manager
Status changed to: Implemented

The mechanism described above will be available in the 2018 R2 releases of Inventor HSM and HSMWorks. Dev builds are available now that include this capability.

 

Jeff

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