Autodesk Product lifecycle Support – 2020 Update

Introduction

Autodesk has a Product lifecycle support policy in which they mention which software they support and how it works. I recent years this policy has been updated every couple of months. In this blog we’ll highlight the latest developments and discuss them.

Perpetual Product Activation changes

One of the latest developments for the old system of perpetual licenses is a change about the activation process. Autodesk no more do offline activations. This means you cannot create a request to activate your software. The only way to activate your perpetual license is to do this Online. You can also use the Online Activation only once. You can then use the software perpetually until the PC crashes and the lic will then essentially crash with the PC.

More on this development read here: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/customer-service/account-management/users-software/previous-versions/previous-version-support-policy

Subscription benefit – 5 earlier versions

Autodesk has recently allowed users to request to install products up to 5 version earlier. This means that if you have subscribed to Revit 2021 you can install Revit 2016 if you have project running in that version. You just need to submit a request. In the past you could only install up to 3 versions back by default.

The process

To request earlier versions than 3 versions back you need to request it from Autodesk Virtual Agent. https://ava.autodesk.com/

Conclusion

As we can see Autodesk is shifting is focus from Perpetual licensing to the Subscription model. So most benefits full under the Subscription license model.

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