Differences Between Autodesk Suites and Collections

One of the changes Autodesk has made to its software offerings is the change to Collections, and the retirement of the Design and Creation Suites. These tips will introduce you to a few of the advantages of Collections, as well as highlight the differences of the new offering. To view

COLLECTIONS ARE STREAMLINED
Autodesk previously offered numerous Suites, with each one attempting to tailor the version to different industries and organizations. The Collections approach is far more streamlined, and includes more software compared to the Standard and Premium offerings — and even, in some cases, the Ultimate offerings.

The Collections are now grouped by industry:

• Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection (AEC collection)
• Media & Entertainment Collection (M&E collection)
• Product Design Collection (PD collection)

This simplifies the offerings, and in many respects the management of these products.

VERSIONING ADVANTAGES
With multi-user Suites, each year version counted as a unique license checked out by a user. As a result, a user opening Revit 2017 and Revit 2016 was checking out two licenses, rather than one.

With Collections, this behavior has changed, and different year versions are all counted as a single license in use. The user who opens Revit 2017 and Revit 2016 is now using up one Collection seat.

COLLECTIONS INCLUDE NUMEROUS 360/CLOUD SERVICES
At the time of writing, the Collections include several 360 and Cloud services, such as:

• Formit Pro
• Insight 360 Pro
• Structural Analysis for Revit
• Infraworks 360 offerings (Traffic Simulation, Watershed Analysis, et al)

With multi-user Collections, these services can be assigned to 3 users in your organization.

SIMULTANEOUS USE
With the Suites, an individual user was not limited by the number of products that could be used simultaneously on one computer.

With Collections, please note this has changed, and users are limited to the use of two titles simultaneously.

INSTALLATION CHANGES
There are several differences in the installation methods for Collections and Suites.

The first difference is that while the Suites offered a single installation package, there is no equivalent for Collections. Instead, individual titles must be installed on the client machine. If you have single-user seats, you will activate each individual title using your Autodesk credentials. In multi-user environments, you install the individual titles, and LMTOOLS will manage the licenses.

This makes installations easier in one respect; instead of downloading a huge installation file, and setting up numerous deployments to customize the software for your users, you deploy or install the applications you need individually.

Note that your users can also install the software they need via the Desktop App. Please review our blog post on this for more information on managing this feature:
http://microsolresources.com/full-application-downloads-via-the-autodesk-desktop-app/

CASCADING LICENSES
With multi-user licenses, the Suites are self-optimizing; however, the Collections do not self-optimize.

Because this is a complex topic, please refer to our blog post which discusses this more in depth:
http://microsolresources.com/cascading-licenses-collections-suites/

Want to get an even deeper look into the differences between the Autodesk collections and suites? Click here to view the capability comparison matrix.

Please reach out to us at info@microsolresources.com if you have any questions regarding this topic.