We're having an issue getting GEOPAK to silently activate against our local SELECTserver install. Here's the details:
SELECTserver: 9.0.0.113
MS: 08.11.09.459
GEOPAK: 08.11.09.493
Clients: Win7x64
We're using the LicenseCmdTool at the end of our MicroStation/GEOPAK SCCM push to set the license server information. In addition to that we're using the Bentley licensing GPO to set the same information via AD. MicroStation itself will activate silently against our local server and our users never see an activation wizard/dialog for this.
The issue we run into is that GEOPAK does not silently activate. When GEOPAK is activated in MicroStation it says "An installed CIVIL product is unlicensed and will start in 15 minute demo mode." If the user runs the License Management Tool from the Utilities menu GEOPAK shows it's in 30 day trial mode. The users can activate against our local server without issues. The click "GEOPAK" in the License Management utility, they click the "Activate" button, and a few seconds later GEOPAK is activated.
This does not sound like a big issue but we have hundreds of users on a couple hundred machines. In addition to that we are using redirected Windows profiles so a user's registry/AppData do not follow them around. On top of that each user is not assigned a computer and usually uses a different computer each day. Each user will have to activate GEOPAK each time they want to use it every time they login which is far from an ideal situation.
Are there any silent means of activating GEOPAK against our local SELECTserver so we can avoid this issue?
There are no silent means of activating Geopak..Once the user activates the first time and gets the license running, the program will auto activate on consequent sessions. You can set a config variable gpk_noautoactivate=1
This will prevent Geopak from activating automatically. If the user wants to use Geopak, he needs to go activate it. It should remember all the licensing information (if not, make sure that the send logs command is performed in the license management tool.
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I can't say I'm terribly pleased with this answer and I know my users won't be either. Basically this is Bentley saying they don't support mass deployment of their software within large organizations with a fluid user base/workstation model. My users will have to activate GEOPAK every time they want to use it since there's no vendor supported method for doing so at install time and manually activating hundreds of installs by hand is, to say the least, unfeasible for our deployment team.
This isn't 1996 anymore and most medium to large organizations don't do software deployment by hand. We certainly don't give our users admin rights either. It's 2013 and we use an automated software deployment infrastructure that depends on a silent software deployment, including necessary activations. It would be fantastic if Bentley could accommodate their customers that have more than a handful of installations within their organization.