License Time-out Feature in AutoCAD

AutoCAD and a lot of other products support the time-out feature for network licenses using FLEXlm. Using this feature can save your company quite many licenses as you can see from this sample graph. If you don't use the time-out feature the usage might look like the blue curve but with the time-out feature on it can look like the green curve. More about License Time-out Feature. This document only mentions TIMEOUT but I recommend that you use TIMEOUTALL instead. This allows you to automatically have any added feature using the time-out feature. I run into this when upgrading to AutoCAD 2006 and found I had forgot to add the new feature to the adskflex.opt file. Instead of using a syntax like below: TIMEOUT 48800ACD_2006_0F 3600 Change it to use: TIMEOUTALL 900 Note also that I use 900 as this is the minimum supported value that AutoCAD handles. Any of the following activity in the active application prevents the client workstation from being idle:

• Any keystroke.
• Any mouse click.
• Any command, Lisp expression, menu macro or script in progress.
• Any Modal dialog box opened (a dialog box which needs to close before continuing to other tasks).
• Note: Using the Help system does not keep the session active.

If you are a user of FLEXlm licenses you might also be interested in looking at JTB FlexReport to further help you optimize your network licenses.