The topic of automating MicroStation comes up on occasion, and as more people figure out how to write code on MicroStation it comes up more and more often. Phil kindly reminds people to review the EULA, however the EULA is a little unclear.
The provision about shared, concurrent, multiple users, etc. all make sense, but the general provision on automated, unattended, non-interactive stuff causes some head scratching.
For example: What if we decided to write an application that would start up MicroStation after hours and run some automated QC checks on all the work done that day which spits out a report that drafters review and fix in the morning? The data was drafted by us using our MicroStation licenses. Say only one instance will be running, and it pulls an available license from our SELECT pool; of which there are plenty. Would this be allowed? From the sounds of it, this would not be permissable. However, if we have a user sitting here after hours who opens MicroStation, clicks a button to runs the process and sits there and watches it, then it would be permissable.
This is a scenario we were talking about in-house earlier this week and something we were considering. But looks like it could be a license violation.
Does Bentley have an available Platform and/or license model that does permit such operation?
-G-
The EULA for our desktop products describes license entitlements for users, not devices and the spirit of this part of the EULA is to prohibit the "serverizing" of our desktop products, including MicroStation. We do, in fact, have a server-based part of our platform technology - ProjectWise. ProjectWise includes a MicroStation-based component and many have extended it to automate DGN-related tasks.
HTH,
Tom
Ok. So if I am reading this correctly, then I would be correct in the scenario we are thinking about would not be permissable with the desktop product, correct?
For this to be allowed, we would need to purchase ProjectWise, correct? Is this the only available license / product / platform that would permit such implementation?
Thanks, -G-