Product Design suite premium maintenance plan

[Anonymous]

Hello,

My company has a maintenance plan for Product Design Suite Premium for 30 seats. We are looking at dropping the maintenance plan this year. We understand that once we drop the maintenance plan we lose updates, support, and are no longer able to use previous versions so we would have to upgrade all clients to 2017.

This is not an issue, however, our reseller is telling us that we will only be able to use AutoCAD Mechanical 2017 from the suite. I'm trying to find out if this is true.

It is my understanding that Design Suite Premium 2017 includes:

Inventor

AutoCAD

AutoCAD Mechanical

AutoCAD Raster Design

Navisworks Simulate

ReCap 360

3ds Max

Autodesk Showcase

Autodesk Vault Basic

And thus we would have a perpetual license to use 30 seats of AutoCAD 2017 after we drop the maintenance plan.

Would someone be able to give me a straight answer on this? Much appreciated.

[Mark.Lancaster · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous

Welcome to the community...

Either you misunderstood or they did..  Not sure why your reseller would even state that...

Whatever application is present in your suite you are entitled to use it no matter if you have a maintenance plan or not.  Granted you are unable to use legacy versions of AutoCAD Mechanical but its still in the suite for 2017.. 

A couple of other things..

1.  In my opinion I wouldn't drop your maintenance..  Many do and then regret it down the road.  So think carefully before doing this.

2.  Are these licenses based on a network license type?  If so you will need to update your license file to ensure your are compliant after dropping the maintenance plan.

Update:  For clarification..  What do you consider the term update to mean?  You can still update your product when related service packs and hot fixes for that version.  But update to the next release, no that's not possible.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Mark,

I think i meant upgrade, we know we'll lose the ability to upgrade to new releases without the maintenance plan.
We don't have a network license, just standalone I believe.

I have strongly suggested that we keep our maintenance plan however I don't get to make that decision I only get to manage and support the installation 😉

We currently only use AutoCAD in the suite and I was not looking forward to having to switch everyone to AutoCAD Mechanical.

Thank you for your help.

[Mark.Lancaster]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I have strongly suggested that we keep our maintenance plan however I don't get to make that decision I only get to manage and support the installation 😉

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I might suggest that you include those who are making this decision to join this discussion..  Although its up to your entity regarding this matter but I think its the wrong decision to save money but in the long run you will end up costing you more.. 

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

We currently only use AutoCAD in the suite and I was not looking forward to having to switch everyone to AutoCAD Mechanical.

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Regarding the so-called "vertical product" of AutoCAD Mechanical, it turns out that there's a trick to loading "vanilla" AutoCAD:

Launching plain AutoCAD from AutoCAD Mechanical

For me, it amounted to creating this Windows shortcut:

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2016\acad.exe" /p <<VANILLA>> /product ACAD /language "en-US"

Maybe you already knew this because you say that your team is already using (vanilla) AutoCAD. However, it's my understanding that you can't have AutoCAD Mechanical installed without also having the base AutoCAD available. This is because AutoCAD Mechanical is a "vertical product" that runs on top of (and thus requires) vanilla AutoCAD.

Further references:

Startup switches for AutoCAD

Command Line Switch Reference