Complacent or Compliant? You Decide!

You better know. No, you MUST know what is running on your network lest Autodesk License Compliance come knocking and find something you weren't expecting. If you haven't already, I would highly recommend you run a tool they have that will scan your entire network and report back to you only what is there.

Behold the Autodesk Inventory Advisor

When you download the zip file, it has 2 files inside it - the installer and a quick start guide which also contains the unlock code to use the software.

Using the tool will require network administrator privileges so you will likely need to shack up with IT to run this, unless you are the IT dept. too.

You have a couple options to scan the network - importing your Active Directory or scanning by IP range were the 2 we looked at. We went with the IP range option as it would be more complete.

Once finished scanning you will get a full report of every Autodesk software across your entire organization with options to export to different types of formats. Here is an example of what you might find.

Don't wait - go make sure your Autodesk license usage is compliant!

Autodesk Licensing Online Only...

For those that deal with getting license files for Autodesk products, things have recently changed. I received a notice back on December 20th via email and had largely forgotten about it until I noticed a recent post by the Up and Ready blog. If in the past, you used to request licenses via email or fax (who uses faxes anymore!?!?) they were retired at the end of 2011. For me, this produced a large <gasp> followed by some vocabulary exercises...

The following comes via a post from the Up & Ready blog and their latest post on the relatively new procedures for requesting license assistance.

One-Step Licensing Assistance Web Form - Use this page to get a report of all licenses registered to your company name or activate a product once (with a wait time)
http://www.autodesk.com/licensesupport
Register Once - Log in with your account info for instant, automatic online license generation (how instant remains to be seen)
http://www.autodesk.com/register
Online Licensing Support for Customers - great for general queries about licensing
http://www.autodesk.com/licensing
Common Registration and Activation Questions - if you are new to licensing Autodesk products, this will be of great help
http://www.autodesk.com/install

Lastly, it was mentioned in the notice sent to me back in December that you can still request licensing assistance via subscription center by opening a case. So now, instead of simply sending an email, I have to log into a system and log a ticket. I don't know about any of you out there, but I will miss the email alias for license requests...