Recap: Commercial License incompatibility with existing educational licenses

[agordon]

As a university faculty member, I use a number of Autodesk products in my teaching and research. The educational license sufficies for almost all my work.

I started using Recap Pro very recently, and upgraded to a commercial license.  That should have given full use of Recap Photo, as well as allowing full access to upload photos to the cloud for processing (i.e. not held in the highly restricted education license queue - see other posts about the "Pending 1%" problems that causes), as well as allowing mesh files from Photo to be imported directly into Recap Pro for processing (not available to educational license holders)..

 After many hours of online and telephone support assistance, the issue is not resolved (although Autodesk has closed both tickets).

The problem is very simple: the Autocad licensing system appears to be unable to support educational and commercial licenses on the same computer.  The fix offered: create a new user account, allocate the commercial license to that user, and use the software on a different computer (you cannot have commercial and educational products on the same machine).

I know that I can get Autodesk to refund the cost of my commercial license, but I would much rather they fixed the underlying issue, which no one seems to be interested in fixing!

In the meantime, I'll keep submitting support tickets in the hope that squeaky wheel get some attention!

[lynn_zhang]

Hi @agordon

Sorry to hear the issues you're having with your ReCap license. I see you submitted a few cases regarding the issues and let me help you follow up with our support team. Thanks for your patience!

[agordon]

Thank you for undertaking this task.  I think you will find it challenging since the entire Autodesk licensing system is predicated on user designation (i.e. commercial, educational, student, etc.).

As a semi-retired technology professional and university faculty, I welcome your involvement, but also know that you will have to engage in the process of re-engineering the licencing validation system to accommodate dual license holders.  

This cannot be a new problem: however, now that AD is seeking to monetize cloud services, we are now seeing problems.

As you increasingly seek to monetize the the online service aspects of your products, this will become more problematic.

It also means that users need to now drive harder for local access and operational rights to software and files.  I know that you need to make money, but not by ransoming our files.

[lynn_zhang]

Hi @agordon

Thanks for your feedback. Our licensing team is looking into your cases and they will do their best to further help you. I have also forwarded the post to them so they can hear your feedback.

[Hotter_R · Accepted solution]

Hi @agordon

I'm from the Installation and Licensing team. 

You are right, the solution you are asking for isn't available. My recommendation would also be the workaround you mentioned. 

To make your workaround more efficient you don't need a second computer. You can also work with a second windows user account and switch between the windows accounts (one account with educational license and one account with commercial license) instead of switching the license in the software. This makes it possible to have both licenses open at the same time and you can chose which one you need by easily switching windows accounts. 

I hope this is another workaround that helps you and gives you a potential solution for your issue. 

[agordon]

Thanks for the suggestion.  Since I use other Autodesk products concurrently and share the same files between products, I would have have to setup shared folders and permissions ... it was a lot simpler to cancel my commercial subscription.

Thankfully, PhotoModeler scanner version works well for what I need (and does everything that ,Recap and Recap Photo does) and the educational version is very affordable.

I was pleased to see that Autodesk also refunded my commercial subscription ... good customer service, even if the product licensing sucks!

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@Anonymous.hotter wrote:

Hi @agordon

I'm from the Installation and Licensing team. 

You are right, the solution you are asking for isn't available. My recommendation would also be the workaround you mentioned. 

To make your workaround more efficient you don't need a second computer. You can also work with a second windows user account and switch between the windows accounts (one account with educational license and one account with commercial license) instead of switching the license in the software. This makes it possible to have both licenses open at the same time and you can chose which one you need by easily switching windows accounts. 

I hope this is another workaround that helps you and gives you a potential solution for your issue. 

---

[Anonymous]

I had this issue too.
If anyone else gets this conflict between educational license and commercial,
you can assign the commercial license to another mail/autodesk account through the Users tab inside the autodesk account console.

You need a second autodesk account (with no edu license!). Create new one if needed.
Un-assign the license from the original user through Autodesk Management website>Users (icon)>Edit Access, uncheck Recap Pro.
To add a new user click "+Add" and type in the email corresponding to the new autodesk account. "Edit Access"in the new user and check Recap Pro.
Launch Recap Photo, sign in with the new user.
This has solved my problem, thanks to local atdsk omnitech team.
Arye