So, after my initial “rant”, I got a very quick response from Autodesk. I already blogged and blabbered about that. Then I followed up with another post a week ago. Well, today was our first “meeting” by phone and I must say: I’m feeling very positive.
Our first meeting skimmed our list of basically 10-12 issues and dove into just a few of them in more detail. Tomorrow we are scheduled to do a part 2 and dive a bit deeper. The folks on the line were fully invested in the conversation, not just pretending. I know. I’ve been on both sides of these conversations for years. I can smell fakeness in seconds. They are geniunely interested in finding solutions and I’m saying that without having drank a single drop of kool-aid.
The key items on our list we are working on as of today is basically as follows:
- User Rights: Making all products work without requiring users to have elevated rights, even during the “first launch” of the product following installation. This applies most to Inventor 2010 (dating back to version 11 though), which prompts the user to register (or “re-register”) on first launch.
- Installation/Deployment: Address the admin-image installation approach for easier bundling of multiple products. Either of two solutions will suffice, but preferrably the first solution can be achieved. The second would be a “plan B”:
- Preferred: Update the “setup.exe” to remain memory-resident until all sub-processes complete their work.
- Alternate: Provide detailed documentation on how to replicate the install process using the admin-image components (msi/mst, etc.) and the proper order of installation.
- Shortcuts: Address the issue of desktop and start menu shortcuts reverting to defaults upon “first launch” of the product. This mostly applies to AutoCAD Mechanical 2010 (since MDT is going away), but even AutoCAD 2010 does this.
- Internet: Address the issue of products attempting to initate “backdoor” Internet connections during application launch. User-initiated is fine, but hidden processes are a major badness.
- Uninstall: Address the uninstall process to suit item 2 above, as well as doing a more thorough job of removing in-use components.
- Raster Design: Address Raster Design’s integration with other products with respect to menus and profiles.
- Updates: Address the methodology and standard for delivering updates. We also suggested creating a client-side manifest as a centralized inventory of all Autodesk updates for improved management capability.
Tomorrow’s meeting should be a good one, based on how today’s meeting went. I will keep you posted.
5 comments:
Amen to all of the above. Deploying Autodesk product in an educational environment is painfull to say the least. They need to wake up to the fact most organizations dont permit end users admin rights and that computers do not get used exclusively by a single user. People want to use software deployement tools be it AD/GPO, MDT, SCCM/SMS, Softgrid, Altris etc and if a competitor embraces these technologies the cost saveings for large users are substantial!
We mentioned to them that the new GPO package the Deployment tool creates is actually the best thing they have going for automated deployments. It's barely mentioned in the documentation, so a casual user (admin) would likely not even know it exists. Our company supports quite a few CAD products from different vendors as well. But I have to say that Autodesk has shown the most effort in improving their tools and methods. It's just a few key issues that we're hoping can be improved, which would take it from being difficult to easy for deployment. We shall see.
Meeting Part 2 went VERY well. All points were discussed in a good detail and some great ideas were tossed around. I'm optimistic about where this may lead. Again however, time will tell. Stay tuned.
What is the issue with User rights vs. admin rights? AutoCAD doesn't require admin rights to run.
You typically install while logged in as Admin, and then the user runs the app while logged on with only "user" rights...
Not AutoCAD, Inventor. The first time you launch Inventor it prompts to "register" itself, and that requires Admin rights. Autodesk confirms this and is working to address this in a future release.
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