perpetual SNL licenses with a single serial number
X licenses are stopping maintenance today other are still kept on maintenance as usual
company serial number is kept for active maintenance licenses
a new serial number is issued for the “out of maintenance” licenses for the latest SW version making them stand alone.
My concern is point 4.
It does not sound right that SNL perpetual licenses out of maintenance are converted to stand alone, every single one of them gets a new serial number.
e.g. You have 100 snl perpetual licenses currently with SW2023 sp5 (assume latest available version is SW2025 sp2) and you put 50 licenses out of maintenance, you get:
50 licenses under your old Serial Number, managed with SNL. still on subscription are allowed to upgrade to SW2025 and later.
50 license are converted to stand alone starting from SW2025, with 50 new serial numbers issued.
Why out of subscription license cannot use SNL anymore since SW2025?
What is the rationale to change what was paid for (floating licensing) forcing a conversion to multiple stand alone licenses?
I suppose the rationale would be that off-maintenance has no entitlement to later service packs, but license server doesn’t care about SP. So, you could upgrade every PC installation to newest SP, but then still check out off-maintenance license for 2025 from off-maintenance server even though running latest SP. The only way to control SP version is by checking serial number during installation manager.
If your off-maintenance date was sometime after SP5 comes available, it would be much cleaner. On-maintenance server for 2026, and off-maintenance server for 2025. Then the SP doesn’t matter.
If you could negotiate a way between your bean counters and your VAR to maintain maintenance for just a few more months until SP5, I would think they should be able to go to an off-maintenance server.
Maybe its different in Japan, or the policy has changed, but when we dropped a number of licenses off maintenance, they gave us another SNL serial and moved them there. This was 2 years ago I think.
They were already on 2023 sp5 I think at the time. We don’t have them active on the server but I believe I can activate them since we are still on 2023. Once we upgrade to 2025, then we would no longer be able to use them unless we left some users on 2023. Could be some weird conflicts.
It was part of a plan to “convert” some local licenses to “Global regionless licenses”. Each of our company’s divisions in 7 different countries moved over some of their licenses to a new global license server. We are configured to get local licenses first, then go to global when they run out.
I tried adding the licenses that we dropped. Failed because the license server was upgraded to 2024 even though we are still on 2023, this was so we could test 2024.
I then went over to our PDM license server which was still running 2023 SNL server, it activated fine. says it never expires but still has an “Reactiviation date” so I guess you have to do that periodically.
@jcapriotti thank you for the test. As a perpetual license it works as expected.
sw imposed a new rule about reactivating the license at least once every 12 months.
we already do it for pdm,cad, simulation for both test and production snl and another stand alone machine running simulaton premium: annoying but manageable. now imagine to do it for 30+ stand alone pcs in the same situation…it would be crazy.
our var is twisting the rules for some reason. At this point I am not interested anymore about their arguments, we have a contract, just stick with it.
I probably have to agree that VARs could do a little difference in this case and the main responsibility lies with dassault.
My comment was more about the technical support teams.
I am sympathetic to a certain extent with them, but their response is usually bad, borderline with denying the problem and too slow. they are also probably understaffed, and not too technically trained or experienced.
I have to follow a PDM site, as admin, personnel CAD training responsible, server and software deployment and updates, internal callcenter, and overseeone one person importing external data.
since the depts are understaffed I have to help with 3D modelling and simulation as well.
basically all alone and I get a lot of blame from management.
There’s no reason to hide names. Good is good and bad is bad. Let’s all the world see it.
I think you’re talking about Canon. We had them as our VAR too until we ended our subscription. We never had a single problem with them, technically wise. Apparently our problems wasn’t that hard and sophisticated as yours.
I’m truly sorry and I apologize if I’m crossing the line, but the way I see your posts here, telling me you’re not from here. Am I wrong? (feel free not to answer)
If it were me, I’d ask to speak to a SolidWorks rep and explain what happened. But we are a large account and have a large SolidWorks/Dassault account rep to reach out to.
