Network Licenses, Options File, Adding Users to a Group

Not sure I really need to record this knowledge for the future, since we will soon be out of the Autodesk network license business completely. All but 30 of our network licenses made the jump to named-user licenses last Thursday. Perhaps I will post something about that experience, once the dust settles and my anger subsides. Returning to the subject of this post, I needed, for the first time, to set up an options file to limit access to those remaining 30 licenses for those running Revit 2016, since the 2016 (and older) releases of Autodesk software have to be uninstalled and reinstalled to change the license type. In my opinion, that is too much work for something that will no longer be "of right" licensed in two or three months. But we do have a few active projects in Revit 2016 that the project teams do not want to upgrade (or do not want to upgrade at this point in time, due to imminent deadlines). The problem is we were not able to convert everyone over to named user licenses for 2017 and later versions before the end of the grace period, and the unconverted users were taking all of the licenses.

What I discovered this evening/this morning is that when specifying the user names for the group I was creating in the options file, you do NOT include the "@" and the computer name as part of the user name. I had always seen users being reported with their Windows login name followed by "@" and then the name of the computer on which they were running the software that was asking for the license, so I foolishly assumed that was how the user name should be specified. But when I reread the license with the new options file in place, I was not able to get a license myself, and someone who had a license checked out who was on the list was also denied. I panicked, and put back the old options file. I looked at the instructions again, and noticed that the examples only had a user name, without any machine designation. I then added my user name, without a machine name in addition to my user name with a machine name, reread the license, and I was able to get a license. Then I removed my user name with the machine name, and it still worked. Adding the other user with out the machine name allowed that license to also be checked out, convincing me that was the correct approach. So now all users that I want to include have the"@" and machine name removed, and I am fairly confident that will work. I guess I will see Monday morning.