Has anyone solved the issue of License overages?

All these suggestions won’t really prevent over usage.  The SELECTserver application is not real-time reporting. Since the implementation of the XM product line and forward, TRUST licensing has been the licensing paradigm. This means the clients are “NOT” connected to the server constantly and can be taken off site to work. With the XM Licensing client it typically attempt posts its usages every 24 hours to the SELECTserver, if it can’t it records the usage and will try again the next 24 hrs. It will do this for 30 days then will go into disabled mode if it can’t post its usages to the SELECTserver within that window.

You also should understand how we count usage.  If you have a select license then the license is good for an hour even if you’re in the application for 20 minutes.  If you only have one license and are in it from 8:00 am – 8:20 am and then someone else uses it from 8:30 – 9:00 use just over used by one.  For further information on this take a look at the following articles:

TRUST LICENSING BASICS

communities.bentley.com/.../2771.aspx

What is usage and how is it calculated?

communities.bentley.com/.../what-is-usage-and-how-is-it-calculated.aspx

Mike

Does anyone else see a problem with having to find third party solutions to this issue? The way that Autocad users deal with it is to just use the licenses they have, when they're out, they're out....no mysterious bill comes every three months. That is a MUCH better solution and one I'm likely to switch to, if they can monitor usage real time, verses one hour increments.

Yes. We have had a problem with it ever since it was introduced. As a result, we have had to keep our SELECT license count higher than it really needs to be because of the potential for over use. And this is now worse with the introduction of QTL invoices!

For example, lets say we only really need 20 licenses of Microstation. Based on this years peak usage in the 4 quarters, we would have received QTL's totaling over AU$20K! Compare this to the annual SELECT renewal for 6 licenses - AU$7.6K.

A lot of people see a very big problem with having to find a third party solution for this (the issue is noted over and over again on many CAD forums). Working offline or at site is important, but checking out licenses has worked well for that in the past. Most of our projects require network access for any functionality anyway, so this system offers little or no advantage to us in that respect. If a project runs out of seats then things were planned poorly, but the existing seats can usually be more heavily utilized  to get over the hump (overtime).

To add to the frustration the responses from Bentley have consistently portrayed this change as welcomed by the design community, and therefore lead us to believe that they are not working on a solution because they see it as progress. The workflow they suggest for implementing license control such as; ask who is using what, plan a software use schedule, see who is accessing files or use check out/in every time are absurd. With hundreds of people in multiple software, offices, and project teams there would be software use emails popping up every two seconds and we would still have overage. And now the suggestion of projectwise, which has it's place, and we use it, but it is of no use in relation to the true problem (original question).

We have resorted to a third party software called Softrack which works well, is cheap and simple and their costumer support is the best I've ever experienced from a software provider. However I would prefer Bentley (whose software is excellent and I am pretty sure have the programming capability) to build this functionality into their licensing tools.

Bentley does many things very well, including this forum, but their licensing approach/support needs some improvement.

A lot of people see a very big problem with having to find a third party solution for this (the issue is noted over and over again on many CAD forums). Working offline or at site is important, but checking out licenses has worked well for that in the past. Most of our projects require network access for any functionality anyway, so this system offers little or no advantage to us in that respect. If a project runs out of seats then things were planned poorly, but the existing seats can usually be more heavily utilized  to get over the hump (overtime).

To add to the frustration the responses from Bentley have consistently portrayed this change as welcomed by the design community, and therefore lead us to believe that they are not working on a solution because they see it as progress. The workflow they suggest for implementing license control such as; ask who is using what, plan a software use schedule, see who is accessing files or use check out/in every time are absurd. With hundreds of people in multiple software, offices, and project teams there would be software use emails popping up every two seconds and we would still have overage. And now the suggestion of projectwise, which has it's place, and we use it, but it is of no use in relation to the true problem (original question).

We have resorted to a third party software called Softrack which works well, is cheap and simple and their costumer support is the best I've ever experienced from a software provider. However I would prefer Bentley (whose software is excellent and I am pretty sure have the programming capability) to build this functionality into their licensing tools.

Bentley does many things very well, including this forum, but their licensing approach/support needs some improvement.