We have been using Bentley Structural Enterprise for a period of 2 years. The products that we use include RAM Concept, Microstran, STADD and Limcon.
We have had a recurring issue where our usage is exceeding the number of licenses which we have purchased. As an example we have 3 licenses; however throughout the billing month our employees are able to access more than 3 licenses at the same time which is resulting in us being billed for the additional licenses.
The way that our system is currently setup is that licenses are being manually checked in and out using the license management tool. When we need to use one of the above programs our employees access the license management tool and check out a license. The quota of licenses is thus reduced.
Once there are no more licenses to check out then they should not be able to access any of the above programs.
However what is happening with out system is that employees are still able to access the programs despite there being no licenses available. They seem to be able to do this via TRIAL versions. Rather than restricting the usage, the program will prompt the user to access the program via a trial version. However when using the above programs under the TRIAL version, we are still being billed for this trial as if we are using a license which is above our quota of 3.
We want to stop this from happening. We want to prevent employees from accessing the programs once our quota has been reached. We want to ensure that employees cannot gain access via TRIAL versions or otherwise unless the account manager authorizes an additional license to be used.
Can a Bentley representative or someone who has the know-how please assist with instruction as to how we can resolve this issue.
Regards,
Andy
Xavier Knight Consulting Engineers
This is a very long bug bear many of us have with Bentley. Basically you can't stop over usage unless you use 3rd party software. The latest Connect licensing will give a warning but it still won't actually stop over usage. Bentley refuse to listen on this.
I had a long talk to Bentley about this matter a year ago and the very helpful Bentley employee recommended a solution that he knew one CAD manager was using. This manager has tennis balls on his desk and employees go and fetch one before logging on. Yes, this was a serious conversation and solution provided to me when I raised this very issue!
Hi,
Talk to Bentley about the Connection Licensing. With that, you can go into the Enterprise web portal and set an option to inform the user that they are going over the specified limit. I don't know if you can force the user not to open the program, but it at least gives the user a chance to avoid the bill.
--Robert
Thank you for your responses..
We had actually been thinking about using wooden spoons or flags-on-hats instead of tennis balls.
Duncan,
Would you be able to point us to the 3rd party software that you are using or know of to restrict usage?
Hi Jyana
I used
https://www.sassafras.com/
It works pretty well. You can set a number of users and it won't let you exceed that. There is a small client program on each workstation that reports back to the main program.