W/regard to the Autodesk account migration, we’re just informed by our SG contacts that existing active users will simply be asked to activate an AD account and will be seamlessly migrated across. Legacy users that are no longer active on our site, however, will not have the benefit of a seamless transition. We have a number of ex-employees and vendors that are currently inactive on our site, and from the sound of it, if we need to reactivate some of these users at a future date (which is highly likely) they will require an AD account (understandably) but it will not be possible to associate it with the original SG account, effectively making them new users with no access to their prior work history. Is anyone else getting the same info? This seems pretty unideal
Once your site has migrated to Autodesk Identity, and the site has been linked to your subscription, your license count will be used when adding or re-enabling a user. You need to have enough licenses available for that step to succeed.
In your specific case, re-enabling a de-activated user, ShotGrid will:
- lookup their email to see if an Autodesk Identity associated with it,
- if not, an invitation to complete their Autodesk Identity account will be emailed to them
- attempt to assign a license to them based on the subscription
- if no licenses are available, the user will remain inactive.
Meaning that you will not need to create a new account for a user coming back to ShotGrid. Once re-activated, all of their work history will be there.
-Patrick
Thanks for clarifying Patrick. I fear we might’ve been on the receiving end of some misinformation here. We’ll loop back to our account reps with this info. Appreciate your efforts to keep the community informed in the midst of this transition.
Your message had me dig a bit more on user enabling/disabling and the emails.
There are currently 2 issues:
- when in the migration phase, once a user is invited (with the migration tool), you should be able to re-invite them if you update their email in the People page.
- after migration, it should be possible to modify the email of a disabled user. This is so they can receive an invite when they are re-activated.
Both issues have been ticketed, and I am working on that first issue right now.
-Patrick
Thanks @patrick-hubert-adsk ! Admittedly slightly off-topic, but will it be possible to selectively invite one-user-at-a-time so we can start performing limited testing the potential impact to any of our tools that make API calls? We’re currently under the impression it’s an all-or-nothing mass invite.
Unfortunately, the Migration Tool is an all-or-nothing avenue at the moment.
One possible (but very restrictive/convoluted alternative) is to use for your tests a user that was temporarily promoted to an admin, has unlocked the padlock on the Migration to Autodesk button and entered the migration tool (without the message that says that the Identity email does not match the current user’s email).
Admin users that do that end up being self-invited if you will. (we link their user with the Identity account)
Once dual mode is enabled on the site, you could revert that user to their previous permission group and go ahead with your tests.
Understandably, you would not necessarily want to use an admin user for tests (as it does not represent your regular user base).
The downside : your regular user will still be shown the dual-mode home page. You’ll have to instruct them to use the classic login until they are invited.
Hoping this helps,
-Patrick
A question about adding users after a site has been migrated.
I noticed that after migration, if I add a new user in SG, they received an email invite to the site and they need to login with the Autodesk Account.
What happens if I add the user in my Autodesk Account, where I manage my other named users. Do their details get added to my SG People page?
Hi @grahamb
After a site has fully migrated, the general guidelines are:
- do all of your user management from ShotGrid, exactly as you were doing before
- when inviting users, licenses will be automatically taken from the available pool of licenses from the team.
- if there are no more licenses available, the new user(s) will be created as inactive.
- once new licenses are freed/bought, those users can be activated.
- make a user inactive will end up freeing a ShotGrid license only if that user is not active on any other sites of that team
Important things to note:
- Assigning a ShotGrid license in Autodesk Account does NOT grant that user access to any site. So it is a moot action. Access to a ShotGrid site is controlled from the site itself.
- Removing the ShotGrid license of someone on Autodesk Account will disable that person on ALL the sites of that team where the user is. This is THE way to centrally kick out someone from all your sites
Other notes:
- One ShotGrid site can only be associated (linked) to one team only.
- One team can have multiple ShotGrid sites associated to it.
- While a user will not necessarily be invited to all of the team’s ShotGrid sites, they only need one license to access any of them.
Hoping this helps,
-Patrick
Thanks for the info. This is really useful.
There’s still some amount of doubling up of work, because many SG users wouldn’t have been used to going into an Autodesk Admin account to manage things.
If I have understood this correctly, a ShotGrid license is granted to a user from within the Autodesk Admin Account, but access to a ShotGrid site has to be done from the particular site, i.e. an admin adds them as a user. And if someone has multiple sites, they have to add the person to each one of those sites manually.
And I’m confused about ShotGrid sites and Teams. One site can only be associated to one team only, but one team can have multiple ShotGrid sites associated to it, looks like a contradiction. Can you elaborate, as I may not have understood this correctly.
I’m assuming when you talk about Teams, you’re meaning the context from within the Autodesk Account Management and how admins can group people together.
Hi @grahamb
You are correct, I apologize for not being more precise. When I talk about teams, I am referring to the Autodesk Account portal’s concept of teams.
A teams is:
- where a specific subscription lives
- multiple subscriptions of the same product are pooled together to account for the number of licenses available
- a user can be part of multiple teams, and can have multiple licenses for ShotGrid coming from these different teams
So, having multiple ShotGrid sites associated to one team is a way to optimize the licenses you have. And it makes it easier to see the global usage and forecast future needs.
I admit that I am not sure I understand what you mean by doubling of work…
The Autodesk Account should only be used for:
- linking a site to a subscription or creating a new site
- manage subscriptions, renewals, increase/decrease number of licenses
- in rare cases : remove a license assignment from a user to explicitly kick them out of all the sites.
Thats it…
When managing users from a ShotGrid site:
- users who do not have an Autodesk Identity associated to their email will be sent invitation for them to complete their registration,
- new users on a ShotGrid site will automatically be assigned a license if they do not have one already and if there is one available from the pool
- new users on a ShotGrid site will automatically be added to the team if they are not already in it
So for the ShotGrid admin of a site:
- they do not need access to Autodesk Account a Primary/Secondary Admin to assign/remove licenses or manage the team
- they do not need to know if the user has a license or not, or if the user is also present on other sites from the team, they just invite that user (or disable them when no longer needed)
- end users do not need to set up an Autodesk Identity account prior to being invited, Primary/Secondary Admin on the Account portal do not need to add those new users,
- this is basically the same amount of work as it was before the migration.
Hoping that clarifies things a bit… And if you could explain where you see the additional work (and for whom it to do).
Thanks,
-Patrick
Thanks for the info.
My point about doubliing work was about Admins, especially if in a production team. They’re going to want to know about licenses and managing subs. So they’ll need to use the Autodesk Account. Just using SG alone won’t be enough anymore. That’s how I see it anyway, unless I’m missing something?
Also in the M&E world, especially film, many are working to contracts of various lengths. People come and go all the time, so I would expect studio/admins will want to un-assign a user when they leave, just as they would with a Maya or Max license.
I’ve reached out to you direct with some very specific info.
Hi @grahamb
Answering some of your questions here for the benefit of others:
Obvious full disclosure : I am just a programmer, so my understanding on team (actual human team) management and subscription handling is… well… theoretical. So I may totally off base, and accepting that I may be wrong.
Doubling the work:
- I guess this depends on the number of sites for the team when you look at the People page:
– If there is just one site, then the info at the top of the page should map exactly to your enabled users
– If there are more than one sites, while showing the number of available licenses, you do indeed need to visit the Account Admin portal to see the full composition of your team. If you want to have a precise list of who is on which site, you need to get the info from all of those sites.
So I do realize that having multiple site to maintain is more work… but here you get the savings of using only one license for all of your sites.
As for the ebb and flow of employees, this is indeed a challenge. But by doing your user management in ShotGrid itself (manually or with scripts), you do not need to check if a given user is present elsewhere or not : when you disable that user from a site, the license will automatically be put back in the available pool if that user is not active on any other sites. Which seems like less hassle for a site Admin.
So to sum it all up, prior to ShotGrid moving to Autodesk Identity:
- Primary/Secondary Admins needed to manage Maya/3DMax/etc. licenses from Account Admin
- ShotGrid Admins needed to manage their users (manually or with scripts)
- Having multiple ShotGrid sites meant paying multiple licenses for users present on more than 1 site
After the move:
- Non ShotGrid licenses are still managed the same way,
- ShotGrid Admins need to manage their users as they did before
- Only one license is needed for a user to access multiple sites on the same team.
Of course, this is a ShotGrid-centric view of things…
Related question : when you have multiple ShotGrid sites, would you want a user automatically get access to all of the team’s sites should they be granted a license ? That would seem to reduce the control of ShotGrid Admins on their site, and potentially expose users to things they should not see/know about. Given the highly sensitive nature of the data/media present on a site.
One hurdle for us which could not be overcome : being able to assign a user to specific sites in manage.autodesk.com was not possible (due to timing, prior commitments, limited resources). So this solution had to be taken out of the possibilites.
It is always a challenge to find a solution that meets expectations / constraints / security.
Thanks for reading all the way to here,
-Patrick