Standard verses Premium subscription

[bridgettrene]

I am sure there will be more information coming on these (hopefully sooner rather than later). One major question I have is regarding flexible user management. Is this going to be available in both Standard and Premium?

We do not use AutoCAD on a daily basis, therefore we have a few seats of AEC collection, and mostly have seats of Revit. On a Standard license will we be able to shift these licenses around to different users, or would a Premium license be required?

[Mark.Lancaster]

@bridgettrene 

It doesn't matter if you have premium or standard..   Its just standard user management of single user subscription (in which it is today).  However when it comes to premium (if you elect to upgrade to it) level, you will have more in-depth seat usages reporting tools.

[lynn_zhang · Accepted solution]

@Mark.Lancaster is right, thanks for your answer!

@bridgettrene It's the way for all single-user subscriptions, whether Standard or Premium, you will assign the product to users who need the access, anytime you want. You can assign, unassign and reassign the users for unlimited times. But as Mark mentioned, with Premium subscription you will have better reporting tools to view and track the product/seat usage.

[Anonymous]

I'm definitely new to the AutoDesk eco-system. I don't see how manually requiring users to move licenses around is better than having a computer do it for you. 

Unless the goal with this change is to create jobs in companies that have hundreds of users that need to be managed. New position title: AutoDesk License Manager

Suffice to say, I'm going to limit my company's exposure to AutoDesk.

[lynn_zhang]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Thanks for your feedback and we understand your concern! If you haven't done so, we recommend you watch this User Management Overview video to walk you through the process. It's actually pretty simple and straight forward to assign and manage users. If you have a large number of users, you can import them in bulk instead of adding each one individually, making it much faster. It may take a little longer to set up initially, but once it's all set, there are some great benefits with the named user plan such as flexible user access and better visibility/control on license usage. You can check out all the benefits here. 

[Anonymous]

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@lynn_zhang wrote:

Hi @Anonymous ,

Thanks for your feedback and we understand your concern! If you haven't done so, we recommend you watch this User Management Overview video to walk you through the process. It's actually pretty simple and straight forward to assign and manage users. If you have a large number of users, you can import them in bulk instead of adding each one individually, making it much faster. It may take a little longer to set up initially, but once it's all set, there are some great benefits with the named user plan such as flexible user access and better visibility/control on license usage. You can check out all the benefits here. 

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@lynn_zhang I don't think @Anonymous was referring to the initial user setup (although a PITA in itself), but rather to the need for ongoing re-assignments necessary to take a license from User A, give it to User B, take from User C, give to User D, take from User E, give to User F etc... sounds boring on paper? Not much more riveting in practice... With network licenses, this was managed by the network license manager and all was well, now this job will need to be done by a sentient human. I thought the future was automation...

[rkmcswain]

@lynn_zhang - read message #6 from @Anonymous 

This is spot on.

[rkmcswain]

@Anonymous - of course the answer is "There is no need to do that", because Autodesk wants every to have a license assigned to them. 1:1 ratio.

What's that? You have users who only need AutoCAD for a couple of hours a week? And this has been working fine with FlexLM for the past 25 years? No further comment....

[lynn_zhang]

Hi @Anonymous @rkmcswain , thanks for your feedback. 

The rationale for the change is to provide and enhance decision-making capabilities - with more insight into usage, administrators and CAD managers can make better determinations on how optimized the usage of the products is, as well as anticipate future need. 

The intent we have is to help administrators understand more about what is being accessed and how frequently, by whom, as opposed to today's network world where visibility is much more limited and requires deeper expertise in analyzing concurrent usage.

[rkmcswain]

@lynn_zhang  - respectfully, this does not answer the question posed by @Anonymous in post #6. This change is creating more work for network license administrators, not less. 

[Anonymous]

I appreciate the intent to optimize usage, but what is Autodesk's plan for optimizing license management? Surely there is a plan?

[m.billep]

Selling Autodesk's actions as a philantropist approach is a sham. Since when is Autodesk interested in anything other than its balance sheets? Me and hundreds of other CAD-Administrators have their own tools for keeping statistics (e.g. JTB). Who will take over the countless hours of work that will go into license management in the future?
I'm so tired of Autodesk's way of doing business.

Mario

[Anonymous]

The rationale for the change is to increase the amount of revenue from a given amount of software usage, without having to do any software development work to earn it. Please don't insult everybody's intelligence by pretending otherwise.

[stephenlkish]

Hi, I know this thread is a little old, but I have to ask...

Who is spending $300 USD per user just to see if their users are using their software?

As for AD single sign on, other software vendors don't charge anything for it.

Prior to moving its customers to a user-based subscription model, the LMS for concurrent licensing allowed customers to see who was using their software and how often.

Autodesk has moved customers to a more profitable named-user subscription model, and still expects customers to pay more for the privilege of accessing actionable data they should get included. It's data that Autodesk collect and use - sharing this shouldn't require yet another subscription.

[pendean]

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@stephenlkish wrote:

Hi, I know this thread is a little old, but I have to ask...

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Just presenting what is listed in case 'assumptions' are taking over, nothing more

https://www.autodesk.com/plans

HTH

[rkmcswain]

@rkmcswainwrote:

What's that? You have users who only need AutoCAD for a couple of hours a week? And this has been working fine with FlexLM for the past 25 years? No further comment....

Of course, since I wrote that, Autodesk has come out with Flex Tokens. So now, there **is** a way to allow users who only use the product for a small number of hours a month on what could be, a less expensive plan. The flex tokens are really just a very short term (one day) rental.

Let's compare, using AutoCAD.

3 Year subscription = $5,315. Or $1,772 year, or $148/month, or $4.85/day

1 Year subscription = $1,865. Or $155/month, or $5.11/day

1 Month subscription = $235. Or $7.83 day

1 Day of flex token usage = $21/day

So if you use AutoCAD for 12 days a month, you are spending more ($252) than if you just got 1 month subscription ($235).

Just make sure to do the math before deciding on a billing method.

[stephenlkish]

Thanks for the pointing out Flex Tokens. I'll do some research, but from what I can see it too is complex in that each product charges tokens for use, so one day's costs can differ from another day's. Do you have experience employing this model, and if so what is the overhead (effort) like to manage it in your organization?

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@rkmcswain wrote:

@rkmcswainwrote:

What's that? You have users who only need AutoCAD for a couple of hours a week? And this has been working fine with FlexLM for the past 25 years? No further comment....

Of course, since I wrote that, Autodesk has come out with Flex Tokens.

[stephenlkish]

Thanks for the link - this is where I got the $300 price tag from

[rkmcswain]

@stephenlkish wrote:

Thanks for the pointing out Flex Tokens. I'll do some research, but from what I can see it too is complex in that each product charges tokens for use, so one day's costs can differ from another day's. Do you have experience employing this model, and if so what is the overhead (effort) like to manage it in your organization?

I do not yet, but we are working on identifying candidates who are very infrequent users, who are currently sitting on a full subscription, to move them to tokens.

The trick will be making sure they don't open the app on Monday and leave it sitting idle until Friday. I'm actually not technically sure if this will result in 4 extra days of token use, but no reason to think it won't. 😕

[chriswade]

I know this is an old thread, but I have to point out that while tokens are nice for occasional users, it is nothing like the convenience of the old network licenses.

I mean, I have person A who needs Revit and AutoCAD today, then person B who only needs AutoCAD today, but tomorrow it is reversed. With a network license, I could get one AutoCAD only license and one license that includes Revit in some form and it wouldn't matter who opened which one, as long as more than one person didn't open Revit in the simplistic example. Add in the fact that we also have people that work during our night time and you can see how network licenses saved us A LOT of money.

And that's what this change was really about, Autodesk making more money, just as the changes in how we pay starting next month are. The reality is not counting additional licenses due to adding staff, even with the 2 for 1 license offers, getting rid of network licensing pretty much doubled our licensing costs.

They claim it is to simplify things and make there be more consistency, but really all it is doing is increasing our costs by yet another $20,000 per year, give or take. Autodesk, are you listening? We can't keep absorbing these price increases that this is causing.