Real talk about Admin license/install support

[kristin_gauk]

Greetings Technology Managers, 

You manage your team’s Autodesk licenses, installation and software updates. How can we make your support experience and resources more meaningful? We welcome real feedback, especially on anything that is frustrating, or slows you down. How this works: 

• We find a convenient time for you—no more than 30 minutes.  
• We listen to your challenges and look for ways to optimize. You are welcome to share your screen, demonstrate what doesn’t work for you, or flag the case that gives you nightmares.  
• We follow-up to test potential improvements for how you manage your Autodesk products—receiving more relevant support when you most need it. 

We’d love to hear from you! You can reply to this thread, or send me a Private Message. 

With thanks,  

Kristin 

Product Manager, Innovation Hub 

Customer Success Design  

[dyoungHD5X5]

Real feedback? Sure.

1) Get Real feedback before you embark on these wild adventures. Everything Autodesk changes is worse than the thing it replaces and takes several years to reach parity. In some areas, it never does.

2) Go back to FlexLM or a FlexLM style licensing model. It was beautifully elegant.  What use to take me 10 minutes annually is now consuming over 100 hours annually over the course of a year. If Autodesk can't realize that, the product managers need to spend their next sabbatical with a job managing a real enterprise as opposed to sipping mimosas on the beach. 

3) Stop automatically doing things. New licenses show up in new teams. Contract Admins getting assigned to licenses. I'm almost 60 days past renewal and my renewal is STILL not properly in order. It's been a constant battle. Over 30 Emails with my reseller and Autodesk.  At some point, you'd think spending darn near $200k would get you some service but instead, I find myself having to double and triple check everything and keep going back to Autodesk and my reseller. Autodesk's process and customer service is absolutely abysmal. 

4) Let me actually manage my own teams. Most of the activity I need to do with Teams the platform won't allow and are Autodesk self imposed issues bleeding waste into my organization. 

5) Stop automatically adding new "flex" products to my existing users.  I choose they get and when. Not Autodesk. Period. You're not helping, you're making more work and costing us money.

6) Provide ALL your products in Flex. Most of what I need Flex for is not available under Flex. I really hate making 20  users a Secondary Admin on a team merely so they can manage 2 licenses that are used in aggregate about an hour a month across all users.  

7) Stop charging me $300 a license to use your products with Information Security Best Practices in mind. SSO should not cost $300 a license. Since you've given reporting to everyone, that's no longer a benefit for that cost and 1/3 of my Premium Support tickets go unanswered for 2 weeks. I've had to find me own system hack to get them answered as my Autodesk rep and reseller have both failed in their efforts to get action on stuck tickets. 

😎 Allow custom deployments to be extended to multiple Admins. I really hate to have my support team each have to create their own deployments and try to make sure they match. 

9) Stop sending my users Emails every time I make a change.  Most users don't need to know and the notices cause undue concern and added unnecessary communications wasting everybody's time. 

10) Can you stop alerting my users that they need to buy more tokens when they don't? Can you send the Email to me as the contract admin instead? Can you send it if it's actually true? That 500 balance that's dipped down to less than 100 has 2 other contracts sitting out there for 2500 tokens....which by the way...don't show up anywhere in the token balance page...only on the contracts page.  Who knows...I'm told that's normal but don't recall that last time I topped off my balance. Then again, maybe it's part of my renewal that still isn't correct despite being time it is and I'll only be able to prove myself when my users start contacting my at 5am. 

11) Allow products to have the same install options as before with the old installers. e.g. Fabrication Remote Entry can't be installed by itself from your interface without also installing CAMduct.  It's not needed and is a waste of time, space and resources. 

12) Allow your custom installers to actually work. I've yet to have a custom install that installs All our products to actually work. It just never creates the installer. 

13) Actually 'Fix' Autodesk Access before you push it out this week. I'm confident that'll create another flurry of needless user panic and wasteful unneeded communication.  This is why it's so hard to implement anything new w/Autodesk....we spend out time in triage mode. 

14) Stop. Just stop trying to be "helpful" and do "helpful" things for people automatically. Just give us 100% control and leave everything else alone. 

No point going on further...I'm sure most of these won't be addressed. 

Innovation Hub....that's funny. When you vomit all over the floor, cleaning it up should not be considered innovation.

I'd expect more from a $4B company. Instead, we get spots at the Oscars and for every dollar we spend w/Autodesk, a mere $0.10 goes to products and services. 

[kristin_gauk]

Hi Darren, 

Thank you for taking the time to share this feedback! We’re reviewing each of these with the appropriate product teams, and will be in touch.

In the meantime, we continue to welcome feedback in this thread from all technology managers on your experience with requesting support for licensing and installation issues. This is an opportunity to contribute to improvement ideas at an early stage in development. 

Best wishes, 

Kristin 

[Katrina_Customer_Advocate]

Darren, we want to thank you for valuing our partnership enough to provide us with honest feedback and recommendations.   You gave us a lot to think about and to dig into; we want to provide you an update on some of your concerns.

“Stop automatically doing things. New licenses show up in new teams. Contract Admins getting assigned to licenses”.

New license purchases are creating new teams and we are actively working to address this known issue. We understand the frustration of Contract Managers getting automatically assigned. An enhanced experience that will allow for team selection for newly purchased subscriptions is being developed.

“Stop automatically adding new "flex" products to my existing users.  I choose they get and when. Not Autodesk. Period. You're not helping, you're making more work and costing us money.”

Admins have shared that its very time consuming to add hundreds of individual users to a new offering feature every time one is  rolls out. Therefore, it’s by design that if a user is individually assigned to an offering, they will get auto assigned to any new product offerings.

If you would prefer individuals NOT be automatically assigned to new offerings, you can assign users via a policy method such as a . This way the auto-assignment does not happen, and the admin can choose if they want the new product assigned. With this option, just one change is required to apply to many users.

“I'm almost 60 days past renewal and my renewal is STILL not properly in order. It's been a constant battle. Over 30 Emails with my reseller and Autodesk.  At some point, you'd think spending darn near $200k would get you some service but instead, I find myself having to double and triple check everything and keep going back to Autodesk and my reseller.”

We had our client services team investigate your agreements, and although we did locate one ticket from December 27th, that issue appears to be resolved. We would like to work with you to understand the concerns you raised.  A Customer Advocate will email you directly to get more details.

“Let me actually manage my own teams. Most of the activity I need to do with Teams the platform won't allow and are Autodesk self-imposed issues bleeding waste into my organization”.  

A Customer Advocate will email you directly to get more details. For example, if this comment related to BIM/ACC, certain self-service tasks can currently be blocked on your end.

“Allow custom deployments to be extended to multiple Admins. I really hate to have my support team each have to create their own deployments and try to make sure they match”.  

Good news, as of about 1-2 month ago, custom deployments can be shared with multiple Admins!  Learn more about it in this article:

https://www.autodesk.com/support/download-install/admins/create-deployments/create-deployments-from-...

“Stop sending my users Emails every time I make a change.  Most users don't need to know and the notices cause undue concern and added unnecessary communications wasting everybody's time”.  

We appreciate your suggestion.  Notifications control has been submitted as an enhancement. 

“Can you stop alerting my users that they need to buy more tokens when they don't? Can you send the Email to me as the contract admin instead? Can you send it if it's actually true? That 500 balance that's dipped down to less than 100 has 2 other contracts sitting out there for 2500 tokens.... which by the way...don't show up anywhere in the token balance page...only on the contracts page.  Who knows...I'm told that's normal but don't recall that last time I topped off my balance. Then again, maybe it's part of my renewal that still isn't correct despite being time it is and I'll only be able to prove myself when my users start contacting my at 5am”. 

This issue with the 2,500 tokens missing, has been fixed and those should be now visible and available on your token balance page.  The suggestion to remove end users from the notifications and limit the notifications to just the Contract Manager, has been received and submitted as a feature request to be considered.

“Allow your custom installers to actually work. I've yet to have a custom install that installs All our products to actually work. It just never creates the installer”.  

We are aware of the current issue where custom installers with more than 5-8 products will fail to create the installer. We're working on trying to address this, unfortunately we don’t have an ETA at this time.

We thank you for taking the time to provide us this feedback. We have shared this information with the relevant teams and decision makers. As stated above, a Customer Advocate will be reaching out to get clarity on the recent renewal and to understand the team management.

Katrina Fernandez- Customer Advocate

[Rory_M]

We're not a large company, we have 9 licenses of PDMC and 10 of Vault Pro.

As with a lot of small companies, we don't have a dedicated CAD manager, that's just one of the many responsibilities that fall under my remit. As such, I treat each PC as an individual installation.

Yes, I'm sure there are ways to improve things via the server, group policies etc but I'm stuck with the resources to hand (i.e. me and my knowledge).

Upgrades obviously take a bit of time, but never used to be an issue as historically they were relatively pain free. Changes over the last few years have made them take longer and longer.

First of all, a positive note - Once installed and running, our systems require very little maintenance so our CAD and data management systems don't take much (if any) of my time during a normal working week.

Now the negatives - Upgrading to a new version is a huge time sink and extremely inefficient. Thankfully this is once a year.

The main issue is removing old versions. Why did Autodesk get rid of the uninstall tool?

Removing an old version of PDMC is an extremely manual and time consuming process. Some of our PCs have just 2 pieces of software from the suite installed (Inventor and Inventor CAM for example). Why does uninstalling these two items involve me removing 10 or 15 additional apps that are left behind?

I used to be able to set the uninstall tool going and get on with other things. Nowadays, if I want a clean uninstall I have to babysit the PC while removing "guided tutorial plugins" and "low resolution material libraries" etc.

Other PCs have more parts of the suite installed (at most, Inventor, Inventor CAM, Nastran, AutoCAD Mechanical, 3DS Max, Vault Pro). Imagine how many Autodesk apps need removing to clean up between releases...

Can't Autodesk create a proper uninstaller that actually cleans up after itself?

OK, I could choose to not do a clean uninstall and maybe there's no need for it and I'm making work for myself but I try to follow best practises when I can. I haven't moved to 2024 yet but am considering using a third party app such as BCU to bulk remove Autodesk software. This shouldn't be necessary and I don't know if it will cause me any problems.

On the installation side, I really miss the days of Inventor Suite whereby the installer did all the products with a few clicks. I know time marches on and progress must be made but the current Autodesk uninstall/reinstall workflow feels like a huge downgrade from previous versions which from a user perspective were semi-automated, simpler and more effective.

Another negative that might get overlooked is getting hold of the software in the first place. Again, thankfully this is only done once per major release. I downloaded some of the 2024 software the other day and the process is so clunky. The workflow feels deliberately obtuse, as if a developer sat down to reinvent the wheel and ended up with a square.

Click "Download"

It downloads a "Create Installer" app.

Run the app

It then starts downloading the actual software (whilst giving you a message saying "Creating Installer", but doesn't give you any options as to where to save it.

The biggest problem is that you can't download more than one piece of software at once or queue them up so if you want all the parts of PDMC you have to sit and wait for one to finish before you can start the next. It's a bizarre design choice, creates a barrier where there should be none and offers zero benefit to the end user.

Direct downloads would be preferred, or even the previous download manager which allowed for queueing.

I understand why the download managers can be useful when internet connections are flaky but surely 95%+ of customers have reliable high speed connections that can handle a big download these days.

Edit - See below Yes, you can create custom installers which contain the specific pieces of software you need but for some reason or other they never worked on previous versions so I lost all faith and didn't bother this time round. We also have different combinations of software on different machines so it's easier to just have individual files to hand rather than create loads of different customer installers.

Back to the original comments from Autodesk about "We listen to your challenges and look for ways to optimize".

Please don't just focus on streamlining the uninstall/install process for the larger companies with CAD managers who want to push out files via a central server. You should also look to make life easier for the guy who is just going to use "add remove/programs" and then double click an "install.exe".

I don't need install support, just a way of removing Autodesk software from a PC in one hit (or as few interactions as possible).

edit - I thought I'd take another look at the custom installers and the process seems quite user friendly so hopefully they will make the install side easier as I can probably get away with two deployments that suit everyone, maybe with a few extra bits added in manually afterwards (I'm the only 3DS Max or Nastran user for example).

I haven't tried using them yet but so far it's the slickest part of the install process I've seen, I'm quite impressed at how easy it is to set up.

[Rory_M]

You asked for real talk so it's only fair that I add the good stuff as well as the negative - The custom installer option is a lifesaver, credit to the team that created it. My bad for ruling it out based on previous experiences.

As I mentioned above I created a couple of deployments which was a very straightforward process. I've just tried installing one of them (containing Inventor, AutoCAD, Inventor CAM & Vault) and it ran like a charm. Double click, leave it alone, come back when it's done.

If only there was an uninstaller to match. For anyone interested, I tried BCU for bulk uninstallation which struggled to remove the main apps (Inventor etc). It opened the uninstaller window for me but I then had to manually click the buttons to start the process and close the window once done. It handled the smaller apps (texture packs etc) without intervention and in one hit.

I can't roll out 2024 fully as we haven't upgraded the Vault server yet but once it's done I'll probably stick with this workflow, even if it is a bit of a mismatch of third party uninstaller and first party installer.

[kristin_gauk]

Hi Rory,

Thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through your flow, and the gaps where we can improve your experience. I've relayed this to our product teams for both installation tools and support. The detail you provided, especially the time and effort to manage multi-application uninstall, helps us design deployments that are more manageable for you.

I hear you in how it's especially important to consider your time commit when managing installation on a (relatively) smaller scale, so that we can free up both you and your team for the work that matters most.

Thanks for letting us know the custom installer option is working well for you.

Your feedback is always welcome,

Kristin

[Simon_Weel]

The biggest challenge, IMO, is the ODIS installer. Autodesk set out several goals for this new installer, but those goals haven't been met - at least not in my case. It's slow. It throws cryptic errors. No repair option.

More in-depth - it seems like it doesn't do much checks & balances. Example. When installing an update, it reports the software isn't installed where it actually is installed.

The log files aren't of much help - they collect a lot of information but finding out about a problem is very difficult.

Sometimes the installer gets stuck and idles away for an indefinite time.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is the installer isn't an installer. The setup for just about any program contains a whole truck load of installers, all doing a specific thing. And ODIS is some sort of conductor for all them installers. And if something goes wrong, it merely passes on the error thrown by that specific installer.

There was a time where the installer for Windows worked about the same way. With all it's inherent problems. Most of those problems where solved by introducing image files - just copy the image and you're up & running.

There's a lot more about installing and updating, but I guess the fora provide enough information to get a good picture of every day problems?

[AllenJessup]

We run the AEC Collection which and cover nearly two dozen pieces of software. I create multiple deployments depending on individual user needs. But I have to have IT run the EXE files to create the deployment and install it.

Because of an issue I was having with 2022. I wanted to do a quick install of four of the programs to see if the issue would be resolved in the 2024 release. Without going into the gory details. It took five hours of working with IT to get most of what I wanted installed.

[kristin_gauk]

Hi Simon and Allen,

Thank you both for this additional clarity. Please keep the feedback coming!

Best wishes,

Kristin

[AllenJessup]

@kristin_gauk 

Another issue I'm finding is that since some files are stored under the IT Admins profile. I can't access them. The files I first encountered this with were DWT files. But there are many more. Since I can't inspect those folders directly. I can't say how many might cause an issue.

[AllenJessup]

@kristin_gauk 

If you want the full details of my installation issue. See: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/installation-licensing/how-to-kill-frozen-install/td-p/11965146/jump-...

[ddieckmann]

The number one issue I face, is we do not provide end users administrative rights on their machines and while AutoDesk Access is an excellent idea (in theory). In practice it is nothing more than an annoyance to the End User because they cannot perform the updates. The best value add I can suggest is to provide an Update Catalog that can be subscribed to, so those companies wishing to restrict administrative rights can also efficiently update their AutoDesk products. We are currently hamstrung to manually download the updates, modify the SCCM deployment and then manually update each of the already installed products. 

[pendean]

---

@ddieckmann wrote:

The number one issue I face, is we do not provide end users administrative rights on their machines and while AutoDesk Access is an excellent idea (in theory). In practice it is nothing more than an annoyance to the End User because they cannot perform the updates....

---

https://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-access/overview 

[kristin_gauk]

Thank you, Daniel for this feedback! 

Thank you to Allen as well for the additional installation details.

Additional roadmap updates can be found here: https://blogs.autodesk.com/technology-manager-community/roadmap/

With thanks, Kristin

[ddieckmann]

Thank you. However, this does not provide an administrative method to deploy updates. It only removes the End User's permissions to see that updates are available. What AutoDesk needs to provide is an update catalog so that updates can be pulled into SCCM (or similar software) and can be centrally deployed. Currently, we either manually pull the update from AutoDesks portal and update the installer package OR manually update on each client machine via AutoDesk Access. Not ideal for a centralized management scenario. 

[kristin_gauk]

Noted, and conveyed to our Autodesk Access team. Thank you!

[kenetter]

Why are Autodesk's installations so broken?  I have been dealing with software installs for decades and everyone else has a simple install that takes a few minutes and is done.  Autodesk installs can easily take an hour (Revit) with no guarantee of success.  I dread every new version of the AEC collection because it only gets worse.  Case in point, I had a user request FormIt.  I created a custom install of FormIt Pro 2024.1 and tested it on two workstations.  One worked. The other did not.  Digging through cryptic log files trying to find the problem.  Have yet to figure out why it won't install on this workstation.  It is a ridiculous waste of time!  Why does Autodesk make this so hard?

[omushahwar]

Hi All, 

I know this is an older thread but wanted to add to it as I have just starting following the tech community. 

1. I know that there was talk of plans to make the Access tool be an installer that didnt require admin rights, that would be fantastic so users could run updates,

2. Please support Intune installs, I dont know why SCCM is still shown as support but intune is not, it is simple to use and easy to deploy from. 

3. It light of #2 please keep your silent/quite commands consistant we have to check them with every install across, programs, updates, plugins and they vary each time it would be great it they were always the same

4. It would be great to have some sort of notification sign up at the license/update level for admins so they dont need to constantly check online/access etc to see when releases come out, maybe there is I dont know but with the size of the AEC collection and the number of programs we use it would be great to have a weekly or monthly whats coming.

5. With the change in direct purchase it would be great to see what autodesk will add for user/customer support. 

6. For support and opening a ticket sometimes its confusing when it goes to credly and not necessarily and Autodesk help desk person. Still helpful but just different and with it not an employee depending on the question sometimes its not the ideal person to be sharing log files with etc just a thought.

[kristin_gauk]

Thank you for this additional feedback, @omushahwar! I'm passing it along to our Access team.

Can you share a bit more information about what you'd like to see for support experiences (#5)? What type of support issue routed you to Credly (#6)? 

With thanks,

Kristin