I reported in January that, “The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.”
Thanks to a policy reversal from Autodesk, this is no longer true. Felice on the Autodesk forums shared the good news:
Hi all, I have an update to share on this topic… we are removing the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limitation. Here are some more details/background:
Overview:
Currently, the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limits the number of collection products that can be used at the same time to two. The terms and conditions related to Industry Collection concurrent title access stated:2.1.1 Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in the applicable Autodesk License and Services Agreement relating to any Industry Collection software program Benefit, the maximum number of Concurrent Access Titles that You or Your Named User may Access concurrently shall not exceed two (2) Concurrent Access Titles, at any one time.
Effective immediately we are removing this restriction and allowing customers to use as many products concurrently within the collection as they need to support their workflows.
Why we have removed this restriction:
The Industry Collections continue to evolve and are increasingly focused on the support of multi-product workflows. The restrictive nature of the concurrent usage policy does not support this progression.
The Autodesk Knowledge Network page on this has been updated accordingly:
This also applies for license borrowing, but only for 2019 products and later.
While this restriction should never have existed in the first place, it’s good to see it gone now.
Moving when prodded is alive at Autodesk.
I wish we knew who initiated that at Adesk. Sometimes I think changes like that are accidental, like it was too difficult to track how many progs you had open, so why track at all – then spin as “for us”. We’l never know since they announce stuff though Felice.
You should thank Andrew Anagnost for this (I do).
Mr. Anagnost entertained some of my Twitter rants earlier this year, which ultimately led to a conference call with Autodesk’s Bryan Otey, Daniel Philbrick, Gerry Huot in their infrastructure group. Carl White was also helpful on this as I understand it.
This is one of a handful of topics I offered opinions on during my conference call and was thankful to receive unanimous agreement from all concerned.
I just walked them through the workflow required for an AEC Collection (Subscription) customer to start a new project and export data for a consultant… They immediately felt the negative impact on production this issue causes (albeit second-hand) and immediately spoke about getting it corrected before asking for my next concern.
Without being too specific, I believe they were each genuinely interested in making things better, displeased that policies such as this were implemented in the first place, and even took additional (unexpected) steps to try and get me in touch with all of the right people to resolve this and other issues that I’ll not discuss here.
I am just grateful for the opportunity to positively contribute to mutually beneficial solutions… Finally.
Cheers
Yes, I saw some of that Twitter discussion where Andrew appeared to see your point.
Thank you, Andrew Anagnost. Thank you, BlackBox.
It still amazes me that stuff like this can get up in the first place, though. If only Autodesk had some kind of customer council where issues like this could be thrashed out in free but private discussions before they were inflicted on the paying customers.
As you point out Steve, some of the things (such as “Only 2 …. products can be run at the same time”) are baffling as to how that made it into a real policy. Is it that some intern suggested this as a way to generate more sales, and nobody listened and it worked its way up the ladder until…..voila …. it’s policy….?
Given what BlackBox says, it sounds like the idea certainly wasn’t vetted by certain groups who would have shot it down before it was made policy.
My understanding was that this was never a physical/technological limitation anyway, so I’m not sure it was ever a real issue for users.