managing licenses

I'm curious as to how others are managing their Bentley product licensing. We have a situation where we only have a few seats of LEAP Steel, LEAP Concrete, Open bridge modeler, Inroads, microstation, etc... and we have many users, when at any time will need to use any of it. Bentley has decided to not allow any of us to hardcap licenses and would rather charge us for overages that we have no ability to directly manage. WE have enough licenses, just no means with which to organize the users access to them. We need to figure out a solution that keeps Bentley from sending us a quarterly bill for thousands of dollars.

  • The semi-automatic solution is to create Custom Activation group and limit number of licenses there. Set checkout period on Selectserver to 0 days and enable "use checkout only". Disable the main key so there is no accident use and activate only using CA group key.

    Then on first use run attached example CMD file to checkout license and it will be checked out for entire day. On next day it will expire automatically and software won't run without checkout.

    set _productID=1000
    
    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Bentley\MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries)\MicroStation\licensetoolcmd.exe" checkout -productid:%_productID%  -productversion:08.11.09.459 -checkoutperiod:0
    
    
    rem Confirm that the value entered is within the valid range of product IDs. This prevents the creation of invalid product entries.
    
    if %_productID% GEQ 3000 (
    	echo Product ID %_productID% is an invalid value. No changes have been made.
    	pause
    	exit /b 1
    )
    
    if %_productID% LSS 1000 (
    	echo Product ID %_productID% is an invalid value. No changes have been made.
    	pause
    	exit /b 1
    )
    
    rem Write registry keys that will display an Expired activation status in the License Management Tool for the specified ID.
    
    reg add HKCU\Software\Bentley\Licensing\1.1\Applications\%_productID% /v LAT3 /d 0 /f >NUL 2>NUL
    reg add HKCU\Software\Bentley\Licensing\1.1\Applications\%_productID% /v LAT2 /d "an3JLsvDcys+L84Uk8ioKoyIPGrRkMBf6EzIA1Lnnqimk4Q0c5rQnH==" /f >NUL 2>NUL
    reg add HKCU\Software\Bentley\Licensing\1.1\Applications\%_productID% /v LAT1 /d WWQJ0001466447095 /f >NUL 2>NUL
    reg add HKCU\Software\Bentley\Licensing\1.1\Applications\%_productID% /v LNT /d 1468952695 /f >NUL 2>NUL

  • I am completely outraged that there is no way to cap to avoid overages. Autodesk does.