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Our specific use of Bentley products

We are a small company. We own 1 license of the following products: WaterCAD, Flowmaster, Descartes, StormCAD, SewerCAD, Map, CivilStorm. There are only 4 of us in the office that use these products, and they are rarely used. In response to the 4 ways "How to Reduce Usage": 1) All 4 of us need the software on our machines. 2) The products listed above are not interchangeable.  3) We close the programs after we are done using them 4) We are aware that we only have 1 license for each of the above programs, and that going over the 1 license results in an overage.

The "Trust Licensing" policy has really been a problem for us. Since the SelectServer is unable to tell us if a license has been used or not, we never know if we will be opening a second instance of the program. We are not blocked or warned before opening the second instance. In order to avoid overages, every time we want to open one of the programs, we email all of the users in the office and ask them if we can reserve the program for a specified hour. It's a hindrance to our productivity.

We want the ability to only use only the licenses that we have purchased. When I open a dgn that is already in use, I am not able to work in that dgn. When that happens, we wait for the coworker to finish in the dgn. If I open our networked licensed AutoTurn, and the license is already used, I am not able to use the program. When that happens we wait for the license to free up. When I open a second instance of WaterCAD, I see no warning, then I get a phone call from our account manager telling me we need to purchase a second license. The result: The "Trust Licensing" policy will eventually force us to purchase software that we do not need.

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  • The way they are handling this does not seem professional.

    You were using their product under their allowed 20% overage policy. Then they come back months later to tell you their policy has changed and you now owe money for the use then, that at the time was within their allowed usage.

    Our account manager is asking us to come up with the money for  max. licenses used as well,  however he has given us the option of using a lease each month for isolated overages, so that we would not have to buy a license outright.  I am not sure how this would work.  It sounds like he wants me to estimate the number of users at any given hour each month, as well as the whole next year to evaluate the costs of leasing vs. buying a license.  This strategy is not well thought out.  If I had a crystal ball, I would not be writing on this forum.

  • All this seems like a way for Bentley to lose customers. Turning into a bit of an own goal!!

  • You're correct - SELECTserver is not a real-time system (for many known and good reasons) so you cannot use it to see what is being used in real time.  However, you can evaluate what was used yesterday and the day before that and it can give you insight on patterns of use over time; insight you can use to direct users toward alternative workflows or products to better meet your requirements.

    In fact, I'm not sure what benefit a real-time system would give you in making recommendations to your users - if they were already using the "wrong" product and you noticed in real time, the associated "wrong" usage has already taken place.

  • Yes, Tom, but try as we might to make "mid-course" corrections to our license useage after the fact, our account rep stated in no uncertain terms that Past Usage would determine the required number of licenses.  If you go over in the past, correcting the overages (as we did like caddcop, by re-deploying product installs more appropriately), that does NOTHING to ameliorate the situation in the eyes of Bentley.  So my contention has always been that without real-time license reporting, Bentley HAS TO ALLOW trusted license overages (which are neither egregious nor constant) to permit us to make these corrections.  My understanding (from our account rep) is that this is not the case.  Yes, we were forced to purchase (actually reinstate) a license of AECOsimBD, which since we bought it, has remained unused, as the re-deployment of installs made this purchase moot going forward.  Seriously, this licensing model still has some kinks (or, rather, flaws).

  • Tom, in our case, patterns over time do not predict our current usage. Please see my first post in this thread. Are you implying that since we have 4 users that could potentially be using a product (which would never actually happen in our case), we need to purchase 4 licenses when we only need 1? I don't see how that fits into the trust licensing model. We don't need a real time system. We need to be able to control our usage. Currently, Bentley offers us no way to do that.
  • Update...

    Bentley is in the process of updating their licensing policy (now calling it SELECT Open Access). Unfortunately, they left out the feature that we need the most: the ability to manage our usage. We have 1 license of 7 different products. If we see just 1 overage per license, we will pay almost $4,500 per quarter in addition to our perpetual licenses.

    I believe that the new "opt-in" policy is a way to answer many of the questions that have been brought up in this thread. For example, "The first three occurrences of usage in excess of license pools during a quarter are “overlooked”."

    They have taken the role of the account manager out of the equation: "Subscriber acknowledges that use of any Bentley application in excess of license pools will be conveniently and automatically invoiced as Quarterly Term Licenses at the end of each calendar quarter."

    This policy is two steps backward. We are still waiting for the ability to manage our usage...

  • Update...

    I thought I would share where we are headed. It might help others to follow our lead.

    We are primarily a Civil shop - InRoads in particular. We need the equivalent of InRoads with MicroStation and InRoads Survey with MicroStation, depending upon the tasks at hand.

    Since we have added products here and there over the years, some before my employment and some after, we have too many choices and no way to know who should use what at any given hour.

    So, we are using Portfolio Balancing to consolidate our multiple products into two distinct products. We are trading in all MicroStation, PowerCivil for North America and InRoads products for seats of Power InRoads and PowerSurvey. This will leave us with the tools we need and in most cases, the survey guys will use PowerSurvey and the road guys will use Power InRoads. On the rare occasion where the survey guys need some extra COGO tools over what PowerSurvey offers, they will fire up Power InRoads until they do not need that extra capabilities. With any luck, our overages are behind us for a while.

    If there are Power versions of your tools available, you might want to look there, as our solution might help you find your solution. HTH.


    Charles (Chuck) Rheault
    CADD Manager

    MDOT State Highway Administration

    • MicroStation user since IGDS, InRoads user since TDP.
    • AutoCAD, Land Desktop and Civil 3D, off and on since 1996
Reply
  • Update...

    I thought I would share where we are headed. It might help others to follow our lead.

    We are primarily a Civil shop - InRoads in particular. We need the equivalent of InRoads with MicroStation and InRoads Survey with MicroStation, depending upon the tasks at hand.

    Since we have added products here and there over the years, some before my employment and some after, we have too many choices and no way to know who should use what at any given hour.

    So, we are using Portfolio Balancing to consolidate our multiple products into two distinct products. We are trading in all MicroStation, PowerCivil for North America and InRoads products for seats of Power InRoads and PowerSurvey. This will leave us with the tools we need and in most cases, the survey guys will use PowerSurvey and the road guys will use Power InRoads. On the rare occasion where the survey guys need some extra COGO tools over what PowerSurvey offers, they will fire up Power InRoads until they do not need that extra capabilities. With any luck, our overages are behind us for a while.

    If there are Power versions of your tools available, you might want to look there, as our solution might help you find your solution. HTH.


    Charles (Chuck) Rheault
    CADD Manager

    MDOT State Highway Administration

    • MicroStation user since IGDS, InRoads user since TDP.
    • AutoCAD, Land Desktop and Civil 3D, off and on since 1996
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