Too small for Network Licensing

I would like to open a dialogue about Sketchup’s current licensing policy. We are a small office using Sketchup Pro as a conceptual and schematic design tool, shifting to BIM in later design stages.

We do not need the ten license minimum for Network Licensing, but the individual licenses are locked down to limited installs. We have four (4) Sketchup Pro Licenses for 6 potential users, with 2-3 concurrent users, typically. In our office, only our designers are using sketchup. Production staff only needs to use it to reference the design work. Even our designers are only using it 20% of the the project design schedule. With your current licensing scheme, we would need to purchase additional licenses to get everyone working, but each license would be in use less than 20% of the time.

We would appreciate the opportunity to explore network licensing for less than 5 or 10 licenses.

In the meanwhile…

have they tried the free Desktop Viewer [ not the Web App]…

john

well its seems better than when I was running an office of 70 staff… at that time SU minimum network license was 50 licences… and like your situation it was overkill. so in the end we resorted to 20 individual licenses… a real license management pain…with staff moving around on different teams, computer upgrades, reinstalls etc etc… even in my own small office now with only 3 individual licenses is a seemingly archaic…

I don’t quite understand why you cannot purchase a network licence of 1… other software companies seem to manage ok… [ENSCAPE, TWINMOTION] … of course a reasonable extra over charge would be expected

They used to do it. Back in the early days I had 2 networked licenses. Don’t remember if it was @Last or Google. That came with it’s own set of problems. We converted to single user so we could use them off-LAN.

Not long ago I called about network licensing again since now I have more than 10 single licenses. They won’t let you convert your existing license portfolio. You have to dump what you have and buy new networked seats.

Stand alone license are not transferable as per agreement (EULA), but they could be more client-friendly in some situations, I agree.

The main difference between a stand alone license and a network license is that the standalone is personal, and therefore not transferable, while a network license can be used by any employee of a company.

Perhaps this sounds unfair (who reads them, anyway) but sometimes, one really wished they had…
Perhaps SketchUp, on the other hand, failed to explain the differences and it’s impact on later development and situations towards the endusers.
A lot of endusers use a standalone licenses as if it were network licenses (ah! So you can install on two devices, erhm)

We see (fired or job-hopping) employee’s leaving with a stand alone license, standalone license’s that are used by different employees and use of Make by interns that are only there for a few weeks, all the time.

FYI: I work for a distributor, we’re not owned by SketchUp, just selling SketchUp, we try to provide design companies the best solution for their situation.

• a network license is available from 5 seats
• single user licences (active maintenance req.) can be converted to a network seat for currently U$ 800.-/seat (article no.: LICS18NWCONVFEE)

Be aware, that the network license needs to talk continually to the Trimble license server (ports 5053/50530 open), a checkout of 7 days for using offline is possible (other runtimes available at ordering).

Maybe it’s semantics but I’m not transferring ownership, just converting the type of license I have so it should be allowed.

That’s interesting. Probably still does not make financial sense for us and the Trimble sales rep seemed to know nothing about this. Where can I find this article? Google is not showing me any links from Trimble.

What I really want is an enterprise key like what I can do with Adobe VIP licensing.

I stand corrected, then! :grinning:

ask SketchUp Professional sales or your local reseller for this.

Enterprise licensing is available for key accounts with a lot of users resp. seats… typically with much more than 10 seats, use the floating network license instead.