Firstly, thank you for your responses.
I've been involved in mass deployment of Autodesk applications for several editions now, with particular reminiscence of the year 2020. That year, GUIDs for all updates were provided, making deinstallation via msiexec straightforward when appending them to the codes for full version applications. Additionally, there was the simple Autodesk Removal Tool, which could be used to manually remove products.
For the 2022 version, I created customised workstation images (one image per product) and a batch file for deployment. The batch file also contained a line for uninstallation.
Observations:
- Autodesk apparently didn't anticipate that people would install patches that aren't listed with their GUIDs on the portal, meaning commands from the workstation image don’t remove the patches (and there is no GUIDs in the portal with products anymore)
- Fortunately, our deployment was up to date, so theoretically, the uninstallation script should have worked properly.
However, in practice, Revit 2022 didn’t uninstall, blocking the installation of new versions. Several integral products remained (like Genuine Service, Access, Identity Manager, etc.).
Aside from Revit and uninstallation issues – the new installer has been problematic. While commandline deployments from custom images in 2022 and 2020 were smooth, the 2025 version required constant restarts to proceed, e.g., five computer restarts for the Inventor installation, and even then, it didn’t always resolve the issue.
In summary, we were constantly restarting to push deployments forward, and in many cases, products had to be installed manually. The current Autodesk installer is severely flawed and a total failure.
I am curious how people are supposed to transition from older software versions to newer ones in enterprise environment when it simply doesn’t work as intended. It's disheartening.
Whenever I see articles like this one from Autodesk's own blog praising their installation experience, I am bewildered:
https://blogs.autodesk.com/technology-manager-community/2021/03/01/whats-new-with-the-product-instal...
