This year Autodesk has stated that the software will be available for DOWNLOAD ONLY. However if you run into issues during the download you can request media be shipped. If you have a slow Internet connection or simply like the box on the shelf the check out the knowledge base on how to request the media. Once the software is available for download, April 1st, you should be able to request media.
According to the help file in 2014 Autodesk installations will also install and uninstaller. This will help when uninstalling an entire suite, (glad this came about as this has been a royal pain in the @$$ for previous releases), as well as help with any conflicts on one program relating to another. I now want to install the suite just so I can test this tool out.
I have been working with a client and setting up all their 2013 deployments. One of the things I tested last week was to see how the licenses were going to work in 2013. With the advent of the Building Design Suites I was wondering if the Revit (One Box) licenses would open up a license from a standard Revit Architecture or Revit Architecture Suite. After days of creating deployments and then installing them on several different machines I had some results, although they weren’t what I was hoping for.
If Revit is opened from from the Building Design Suite Ultimate and there aren’t any licenses available then it will look to any Building Design Suite Premium for a license file. Unfortunately if there aren’t any licenses available from the Design Suites it will NOT open a license from a standard Revit Architecture (Structure or MEP) or Revit Architecture Suite.
In finding this out I had to create and install a deployment for all versions of Revit and all of the suites then I had to install them accordingly on the clients machines. So alot of the clients had to have two different versions of Revit installed because of this lack of cascading.
Just before posting this I realized that Up and Ready posted about this at the end of last week. Wish it would have been 3 days earlier would have saved me some time.
As all of us are receiving the nice USB drive with our BDS we are going to jump into creating deployments or possibly just install it. Paul Aubin posted about his issued installing the software and Mark McDonough reminded us all about a blog post from Autodesk about the issues that were in the 2012 deployments as well. The nice part about the UP and Ready blog post is that they showed how to create deployments from the suite to include only the AutoCAD based products or only the Revit Based products. This is a good thing in my opinion in the fact that alot of my clients keep saying they don’t want to install the the AutoCAD based products on most of the machines just the Revit side of things. So if this is a concern for you check out the post and divide your deployments.
Paul Aubin wrote a nice post about his trials and tributes while installing Autodesk BDS 2013. I thought I would follow his thoughts and post about my adventures.
First off I didn’t have the issues that Paul had while downloading, I set mine to download went to bed and it was on the Install screen when I woke up in the morning. I cancelled out of this to go check about the folder naming Paul had described in his post and I didn’t have this issue. My folder structure was this “BDS_ULT_2013_English_Win_x86x64”. So no issue with the long version. Although I do agree that it has both 62 and 32 bit versions here so the folder is large to say the least. The downloaded and extracted .zip file ended up being 66GB on my hard drive.
By default for me when I started the install only Revit, AutoCAD and Navisworks Manage were checked for install. I thought this was a bit unusual since they are pushing the Suites you would think some of the other programs would be checked so users would have an icon on the desktop and try out something new. I also found it odd that AutoCAD Architecture and MEP installed 3 icons for each, Imperial, Metric and English Global. I know I told it to install all of those options but do I seriously need an icon for each.
I did notice that all of the products from the Media side of Autodesk all had updates (service Packs) available for them, including: SketchBook Designer, Showcase, 3DS Max Design. I do like this about the installations of late. I remember back in 2009 when the disks that were delivered were out of date because they had released a service pack for Revit during the shipping.
Infrastructure Modeler shouldn’t even have any configurations because all you can do is change a path, which is in the options later. I did install this program although I don’t foresee being able to try it out for a while.
I started the deployment and it took me 20 minutes just to go through the configurations and download the service packs for the media software. I then took 2 hours to run the installation, not bad considering everything it was installing. I didn’t have any issues with anything failing so for me it went all smooth.
All I can say is sorry Paul my experience wasn’t as bad as yours.