Top Ten Autodesk Software Support Queries: Requests 6-10

On Monday we published the first five of the top ten support requests that come into Ideate Technical support. Today, the long-awaited, highly-anticipated 6-10 requests present themselves for your reading pleasure (and bookmarking reference convenience):

As Support manager here at Ideate we see a lot of general Autodesk cases come in, some of which are repeat questions or issues. Bradley, Ideate’s Technical Support Dispatcher, and I have come up with a list of our top ten.  The first line of support often deals with new Features, Network Licensing setup as well as troubleshooting Installations. Please take a look at the most common issues we see:

6. Cross Platform Licensing Designating Mac/PC for AutoCAD Autodesk supports a mixture of Operating Systems to run the software as standalone or network on workstations including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Complete the Cross-Platform Licensing form to designate the mixture you would like to run. This will allow a download of the preferred version of the software.
7. Network License of Software Requires a Server Setup The most versatile license type by Autodesk is the Network license. This allows unlimited workstation installations to pull a license when needed from the pool of available seats. This requires the install of a License Manager on a designated Server hosting the license file. The License Manager must be setup before the software on the workstations so it can point to the Server during a Network installation. Use Ideate’s Step by Step Autodesk Network Licensing Guide for help on setting everything up properly.
8. Installing the Software as Standalone, Network or Trial During installation there are three specific choices to make – either Standalone, Network or Trial. After downloading the software or using media to run the .exe and click Install you are asked to designate the License Type. Standalone only requires the Serial Number and Product Key. Network needs to be able to see the Server that is hosting the license and Trial is a fully functioning version of the software for 30 days that reverts to a viewer after this time. It’s helpful to reference the Autodesk software installation steps with screenshots.
9. Invalid Serial Number or Product Key During Installation The first issue many of our customers run into is a red X indicating the Serial Number or Product Key is incorrect. The most common mistake is caused by the wrong software or version being installed. Serial Number and Product Key for 2012 is different than the one for 2013 and AutoCAD is a different installation than AutoCAD MEP. Always be sure to download the correct software from Subscription Center or use the correct physical product box. Also, have a look at the Autodesk licensing issues knowledge base.
10. Downloading the Trial Revit as the All-in-One Version Customers occasionally need access to software immediately and are unable to download software from Subscription Center or the media has not arrived yet. Downloading the trial is a quick and easy way to get the software going and can easily be converted into a full version. The trial download uses the same prompts and can be activated using a valid Serial Number and Product Key for Standalone or Network. The issue with Revit products is that only the Building Design Suite version with the all-in-one features is available. This means you cannot download a trial of Revit MEP or Revit Architecture to activate, it must be from the media or download. Here is a link for the free Autodesk Revit trial.

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Derek Wielkopolski
Ideate Technical Support Manager/Application Specialist
Derek holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Roger Williams University, Rhode Island. He is experienced working within the AEC industry from concept design through construction administration for both small and large scale projects. As Ideate’s Support Manager he ensures a timely and quality response to support requests and questions. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dwielk

Bradley Cooley
Technical Support Dispatcher
Bradley earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Oregon, the Portland, Oregon campus, where his special research and design emphasis was on production facilities including wineries, breweries and distilling. Bradley’s professional experience has a design build services for residential construction and environmental graphics focus. Within his community, he volunteers as a youth athletics coach. As an Ideate tech team member, Bradley provides customer service by phone and online assistance for software installation and functionality. He is based in the Ideate Portland, Oregon office.

Get it. Know it. Use it.

Top Ten Autodesk Software Support Queries: Requests 1-5

As Support manager here at Ideate we see a lot of general Autodesk cases come in, some of which are repeat questions or issues. Bradley, Ideate’s Technical Support Dispatcher, and I have come up with a list of our top ten.  The first line of support often deals with new Features, Network Licensing setup as well as troubleshooting Installations. Please take a look at the most common issues we see:

1. License Cascading What’s license cascading? License cascading is the ability for network licenses to float from one product to the other. For example, my license file has seats of AutoCAD and seats of the Building Design Suite Premium. My install of AutoCAD is from the BDSP; and because of license cascading it will pull from the pool of AutoCAD licenses first until all seats of AutoCAD are taken. Once all of those seats are in use it will then cascade up to the BDSP licenses. In general, cheaper products’ licenses are pulled first then cascade up to the more expensive ones. Be sure to bookmark Autodesk’s official license cascading order list.
2. Autodesk 360 Setup and Configuration Autodesk 360 is a cloud-computing platform with various features such as storage, collaboration, visualization, and simulation tools. It’s available for Subscription and non-Subscription customers and its features vary by different products. More information can be found by reading the Autodesk 360 FAQs.
3. License Switching Between Standalone and Network Occasionally users will need to switch their current installation from standalone/trial to network or vice versa. The best practice is to do a complete uninstall/reinstall. But there are some instances where this isn’t an option. There is a workaround that involves going into the registry and can be used in a pinch if need be. Keep in mind – Ideate does NOT support this method and advises only users who are comfortable and knowledgeable about the registry to perform the Standalone to Network workaround.
4. System Requirements Technology is a fast paced industry and computer hardware is changing constantly. As a result software requirements are changing just as quickly to take advantage of all that new computing power. Make sure your machine is up-to-snuff. And keep in mind; minimum system requirements are just that – minimum. Future-proof your purchase by going above and beyond, make sure there’s room for expansion – i.e. extra slots available for more RAM. It’s also helpful to get familiar with the System requirements for Autodesk products.
5. Supported Graphics Hardware We’re discovering more and more often the importance of a properly matching OS, video card and video card driver. Issues you wouldn’t even think would be related to graphics hardware like crashing are often resolved by checking the driver version. See if your card is certified and where to find the accompanying certified driver.

Be sure to tune in on March 20th for Ideate’s Top Technical Support Requests 6-10!

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Derek Wielkopolski
Ideate Technical Support Manager/Application Specialist
Derek holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Roger Williams University, Rhode Island. He is experienced working within the AEC industry from concept design through construction administration for both small and large scale projects. As Ideate’s Support Manager he ensures a timely and quality response to support requests and questions. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dwielk

Bradley Cooley
Technical Support Dispatcher
Bradley earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Oregon, the Portland, Oregon campus, where his special research and design emphasis was on production facilities including wineries, breweries and distilling. Bradley’s professional experience has a design build services for residential construction and environmental graphics focus. Within his community, he volunteers as a youth athletics coach. As an Ideate tech team member, Bradley provides customer service by phone and online assistance for software installation and functionality. He is based in the Ideate Portland, Oregon office.

Get it. Know it. Use it.

eLearning – Upcoming Classes

Join the Ideate Tech Experts for eLearning – live online classes that provide your entire organization with easy access to premium education.

Upcoming classes include: 

9.4.12::Ideate 101:
Network License Manager
9.11.12::Revit 201:
Converting Blocks to Families
9.13.12::Revit 201:
Stairs and Railings in Revit
9.18.12::Civil 3D 201:
Analysis for Master-Planning

Each class is designed to give you specific, improved results in a particular topic. You can interact with the instructor right from your own office, while eliminating travel time. Because the class schedule rotates, you can easily select your topics of interest and choose the day which best meets your schedule.

Click here for class descriptions, times and registration link. Questions? Contact education@ideateinc.com

Get It. Know It. Use It.

eLearning – Upcoming Classes

Join the Ideate Tech Experts for eLearning – live online classes that provide your entire organization with easy access to premium education.

Upcoming classes include: 

8.30.12::Revit 201:
Revit for Interior Designers
9.4.12::Ideate 101:
Network License Manager

Each class is designed to give you specific, improved results in a particular topic. You can interact with the instructor right from your own office, while eliminating travel time. Because the class schedule rotates, you can easily select your topics of interest and choose the day which best meets your schedule.

Click here for class descriptions, times and registration link. Questions? Contact education@ideateinc.com

Get It. Know It. Use It.

Setting Up Network Licensing with AutoCAD for Mac 2012

Did you catch Autodesk’s Design 8.16 event? Autodesk released AutoCAD for Mac 2012, AutoCAD LT for Mac 2012, and a separate AutoCAD WS app for Mac OS X.

Whether you thought it was a worthy enough “big” announcement or not doesn’t matter - what you thought they would announce Revit for Mac from the AutoCAD team? There are a lot of AutoCAD users out there, and a lot of them are moving to the Mac platform. And to be honest I like seeing how they’re continuing to develop AutoCAD for Mac. Besides, I love any chance I get to jump on our iMac here.

Literally within minutes of the announcement I was downloading AutoCAD for Mac 2012, trying to will that progress bar to completion. So what feature of AutoCAD was I anxiously waiting to try out? Network Licensing, and not just your normal “run of the mill” network license, but the ability for AutoCAD 2012 and AutoCAD for Mac 2012 to share licenses! Meaning, a pool of AutoCAD licenses can be handed out regardless of platform, Windows or Mac. You don’t need separate AutoCAD and AutoCAD for Mac licenses. Aside from Express Tools… yeah, I don’t get it either; network licensing was the #1 request I saw from our customers. Typically, our AutoCAD for Mac customers are either mid-sized firms with the majority of users on Windows and a couple of users on Macs who need to use AutoCAD; and smaller firms solely on Macs.

I wanted to first check out how the network licensing works between the two platforms. I ran into a couple of issues, mostly dealing with the Mac on our network and getting everyone to talk with each other. This is what I want to pass along to our readers should they run into the same issues.

After completing the download and launching the installer I began going through the install screens.

When prompted for the server name, I typed in our license server’s host name just as I’ve done on countless other network installs and clicked Continue. This is where I ran into trouble. I got a message saying our license server couldn’t be contacted.

Which I thought was a little strange considering I could see the other PCs on our network through Finder and I could see the Mac on our network from the license server.

“Can you ping the server?” This is the first question we ask in support when customers call in with network license connection issues. And I admit it was a knee jerk reaction that caught me off guard. “I don’t know…” To ping another computer in Windows is easy. All you do is open the command prompt and type “ping,” but how do you do it in Mac OS? Well, after a little Googling I found out how. You simply go into Applications, Utilities, and launch the Network Utility. Once in the Network Utility, click Ping and type in the name of the computer you want to Ping - easy, right? And again I got an error when typing our license server’s host name. So then I tried the IP address and this time it worked. 

I then went back to the installation and replaced the server name with the server IP address and this time I didn’t get the error message and proceeded with the rest of the installation without trouble.

Just to be sure everything was working like it should, I clicked the Application Menu, About AutoCAD, and went into Product Information.

Sure enough, AutoCAD for pulled a regular AutoCAD license - success.

The lesson to be learned here is, when using network licensing for AutoCAD between Mac and Windows platform you’re better off using IP addresses than host names when trying to talk with the license server. This will resolve any kind of naming issues between the two.

So now I’m up and running with AutoCAD for Mac 2012 pulling an AutoCAD license. And it works seamlessly; really happy Autodesk decided to go this route. It just makes sense, an AutoCAD license is an AutoCAD license whether you’re on AutoCAD for Windows or AutoCAD for Mac. But it still bugs me I can’t ping the license server by host name. After some more Googling I’ve isolated the issue to be a problem with DNS naming for the Mac; it even pulls old host names from our network instead of using the one I created. If anyone is reading this and knows the answer, hit me up on Twitter and let me know.

I hope this helps those of you out there that run into the same problem. Next up, setting up the license server on a Mac for a Mac only licensing environment.

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Derek Wielkopolski
Technical Support Manager/Application Specialist
Derek holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Roger Williams University, Rhode Island. He is experienced working within the AEC industry from concept design through construction administration for both small and large scale projects. As Ideate’s Support Manager he ensures a timely and quality response to support requests and questions. Follow Derek on Twitter: @dwielk

eLearning – Upcoming Classes

Join the Ideate Tech Experts for eLearning - live online classes that provide your entire organization with easy access to premium education.

Upcoming classes include: 

7.19.11::Revit 201: Leveraging Design Options
8.2.11::Network License Manager 101

Each class is designed to give you specific, improved results in a particular topic. You can interact with the instructor right from your own office, while eliminating travel time. Because the class schedule rotates, you can easily select your topics of interest and choose the day which best meets your schedule.

Click here for class descriptions, times and registration link. Questions? Contact education@ideateinc.com

Get It. Know It. Use It.

eLearning – Upcoming Classes

Join the Ideate Tech Experts for eLearning - live online classes that provide your entire organization with easy access to premium education.

Upcoming classes include:

4.5.11::Revit 301: Revit Architecture Familiy Editor Basics
4.12.11::Ideate 101: Network License Manager

Each class is designed to give you specific, improved results in a particular topic. You can interact with the instructor right from your own office, while eliminating travel time. Because the class schedule rotates, you can easily select your topics of interest and choose the day which best meets your schedule.

Click here for class descriptions, times and registration link. Questions? Contact education@ideateinc.com

Get It. Know It. Use It.

Autodesk License Compliance Tip - Asset Locator

If you need to confirm which Autodesk software products you have and where each is installed, check out the Autodesk Asset Locator which will find:

• Product, version, and serial number
• Product language
• Network or stand-alone installation type
• Service pack level
• Installation location

For free download, Tool Guide .pdf and other useful tips, click here.