Getting ready for Named User Licensing, SSO, and Directory Sync in Education

[EduITAdm]

Hello,

We are trying to prepare for the transition from network server-based licensing to Named User licensing. We want to use SSO and Directory Sync. We see this blurb:

So we contact our reseller about this as directed when following the "contact us" links for the Premium or Enterprise purchase page. He comes back and basically tells us that in order to use directory sync, we would need to purchase a premium plan for every license/user on campus. So, for a single free product license of 3000, we are talking $150,000! This is nuts! That blurb seems to imply that in order to use the functionality of AD/Sync and automatic product assignment, we simply need to purchase a single product license with the premium add-on. Could someone who might have been through this already clarify this for me, please? We currently subscribe to four commercial licenses for our facilities group, and we were thinking that we could just upgrade one of those to premium, but our reseller has a different idea. 

[SIT-ITS]

Have run into the same issue and trying to find a way around it at the moment. Have you made any progress?

[EduITAdm]

We went ahead and completed the inquiry form listed there as well, and support just granted us a 3K user premium upgrade for Architecture, Mechanical, and Revit. It came in as a purchase order directly from Autodesk with no costs listed. It said we would receive some follow-up emails with directions on setup, but none arrived. So we are in a bit of a limbo, and I have not had a chance to reach out to Education support for further direction.

[sundermannc]

Following because we have the same question.

I'm wondering if I just need to stick with the current licensing (via the Flex LM software) that we've used in the past.  I know it said March 2026 was the deadline, but I was wondering if that just means you can't request more licenses after March 2026?  As in, maybe I can get one more school year and then deal with all this.  Maybe by then the Education part will be more clear.....

[sundermannc]

Found this article.

https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/EDU-Network-and-Mu...

I find it humorous that they apparently don't seem to think Directory Sync would be important in Education.  "Hey just manually do your license assignments like it's the 1990s!"  lol

[EduITAdm]

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@sundermannc wrote:

Following because we have the same question.

I'm wondering if I just need to stick with the current licensing (via the Flex LM software) that we've used in the past.  I know it said March 2026 was the deadline, but I was wondering if that just means you can't request more licenses after March 2026?  As in, maybe I can get one more school year and then deal with all this.  Maybe by then the Education part will be more clear.....

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The 2025 versions will be the last to support network licensing. We went ahead and took the usual route for this upcoming academic year and acquired our 1-year network licenses for the products we use. We always deploy the current year versions each fall semester and keep them through the spring. This means we will need to be ready to switch over by May unless we are able to get an additional license just before the deadline to carry us through the summer. By Fall of 2026 we would need to be on SSO and Named User to deploy the 2026 versions.

[EduITAdm]

People are reporting successfully getting network licenses for 2026 as well. I had received an email at some point implying that it was not the case. So theoretically, if you got a license just before the deadline, it would be good for a year, but would that cover the full term? We would be two months short.

[EduITAdm]

Did anyone notice that the text on that page now says we need a "Business Success Plan" to get AD sync?

https://www.autodesk.com/in/support/account/education/admin/enable-sso#

[rscha_crcsd]

We're also going through the same run around. We enabled SSO before the School Year in prep that the Network License server will be decommed during the year. However, once we enabled SSO (with auto create users into the team) we're finding we cannot easily manage accounts under our team with the available products/licensing (3000 seats). As IT, we do not know what staff OR students require access to these products (hence why SSO auto-creates attempted accounts in our domain). However, even with the accounts being created, they do not auto-assign products for them.

We in IT cannot sit here staring at the Autodesk portal waiting for random accounts to show up to then manually assign a product. That's even if we know which product the newly added user needs (ie; Inventor, Revit, Fusion, etc).

We also cannot give RBAC to Teachers to assign/invite students as the only available roles are Administrator roles which is overkill access for them. I reached out to support via email because that's all we get with Education licensing and they responded to disable SSO and have our users create Autodesk accounts manually using our domain accounts and then to individually request products to their account.

Here's the hiccup there... we have some buildings that cannot get authorized for education licensing for whatever reason via the SheerID activation/authorization. So in order to get those buildings an autodesk account we need SSO, but with SSO we cannot manage licensing as admins.

Any insight or help would be appreciated as I feel Autodesk is strongly geared toward paying customers and us Education admins/users are stuck in between a rock and hard place. Either Autodesk needs to allow Education to auto-assign products to the auto-created users in our SSO domain OR give IT the ability to give a role to Teachers to assign and invite their Student rosters without giving them access to remove/disable SSO or other Admins.

[rscha_crcsd]

Where would one find this inquiry form? Our District has already been flagged eligible for 3000 product assignments as IT admins, however, we'd love the option to turn on the directory sync in order to automatically assign products rather than going down the manual route. If we can submit a similar form I wonder if we might get further directions that I can follow-up with for anyone else here in the same boat.

[EduITAdm]

They changed the requirements to something that is likely incredibly expensive. See my later post. 

[EduITAdm]

There is also a Reddit thread discussing this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HigherEDsysadmin/comments/1mhj58q/anybody_out_there_managed_to_get_autodesk...