Improved Install and Deployment Experience

[Tiana_Y]

Hi Everyone! 

Autodesk has improved the installation and deployment experience making it faster, easier, and more reliable. Whether you are installing a product or creating a deployment, learn exactly how the experience has changed from our Blog Posts below!

How is my install experience better?

How is my deployment experience better?

Interested in how you can send us feedback to make it even better? Use the link provided and let us know your thoughts!

Wishing you the Best,

Tiana.D

[LoldfieldKCZAA]

Unfortunately I think I speak for most sysadmins when I say that this is not a huge improvement operations wise over the previous system. Better would be an executable or a command-line module that could be passed different parameters to install, update or customize installs & licensing, either through the A360 desktop app or a standalone module/executable. This would allow for quicker initial deployments as well as easier unattended patching hopefully without the need to navigate clunky web interface to download an installer for each product, which then needs to be updated regularly.

[smolini]

Is Autodesk philosophically opposed to standard package distribution techniques? It has never been simple to package autodesk software for distribution. Now it seems they've finally decided to support Configuration manager deployments just in time for Intune to abandon that platform entirely.

[Simon_Weel]

'Deployment experience'. Oh boy, now we know where this whole disaster came from - marketing department. Probably rebranded with a fancy name too. Give it a trendy name and then it doesn't matter the 'experience' is actually rather frustrating. 

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Interested in how you can send us feedback to make it even better? Use the link provided and let us know your thoughts!

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Well, good luck sharing your thoughts when you cannot post to that forum.

Simon

[MKabachenko]

I'm a Sys Admin that helps manage approximately 150 Virtual Machines with Various Autodesk products, and the new deployment tool has just been an absolute pain to work with.

As LoldfieldKCZAA mentioned, having the ability to have an executable and or command line parameter options to deploy these would make the process much easier to troubleshoot and manage.

I honestly cannot understand why Autodesk thinks all of our end users have Local admin rights and that we do not utilize some sort of endpoint management software to do these installs (We utilize IBM Bigfix) when they create these new deployment tools.

I honestly feel with this tool we took a step back and not forward.

[Tiana_Y]

Hello, 

@LoldfieldKCZAA, @MKabachenko, and @smolini - I have forwarded your feedback and sentiments to our team, I will close the loop with you once I hear back from them. 

@Simon_Weel - You are able to reply to topics in the I&L Feedback Hub and if need be we create threads based on customer engagement on specific topics (for instance your topic on the custom deployment). Feel free to reach out to me directly if there is a topic you would like to see. 

Thank you all for your insights! 

Tiana.D

[LoldfieldKCZAA]

Thanks Tiana.

To give you an idea what I'm talking about I thought I'd provide a bit of an example.

For us windows natives powershell would be the obvious choice, something like:

Install-AdeskProduct -FeatureID ACD -ProdKey 00L1L -ProdVer 2020.0.0.F (or even better, -ProdVer Latest) -LicMethod (1,2,4,ANY) -SerialNo ##### -LicenseServer flexlmserver.mydomain.com

Modify-AdeskProduct -FeatureID RVT -ProdKey 00L1L -ProdVer 2020.0.0.F -AddPlugins RobotStructuralAnalysis,RevitDBLink

Or a binary that does the same thing for cross platform

adskcmdinstaller.exe -install -f ACD -pk 00L1L -pv 2020.0.0.F -lm 2 -ls flexlmserver.mydomain.com

and the respective Modify, Update, Repair and Delete commands.

We could then plug this into any packaging system we like (intune, sccm, saltstack, scripts) and make managing all of this a whole lot easier.

I'm not sure how you handle auth, maybe an API key?

Cheers,

Laurence.

[smolini]

While we're thinking about it, I'd like to put a plug out there for WinGet. But even a simple exe that has the appropriate switches available to make the install silent and entirely local while staying relative to the executable location would be a huge step up from what's available now.