One of the new features of AutoCAD Inventor 2010 (still sounds oddly) is “dynamic licensing”. When you read the explanations, it appears to be a very complicated concept, especially in combination with the existing cascade licensing, but in fact it is not that complicated.

Basically, if you have network licenses of both Inventor Suite and Inventor Professional, you can start Inventor Professional and until you start the first “professional” function, your Inventor consumes only the plain “Suite” license. So this functionality simplifies the deployment of Inventor installations in your company (everyone can have InventorPro installed) and helps you save money on the more expensive “Pro” licenses. Of course all of that makes sense only if you are one of Autodesk’s big accounts with multiple Inventor and Inventor Professional network licenses.

The above mentioned “cascade licensing” works already in existing network installations – it applies to all “suite” licenses of Autodesk software and works like this: if you have e.g. AutoCAD Mechanical licenses and Autodesk Inventor licenses, starting AutoCAD Mechanical with no free Mechanical licenses will automatically pick the “next higher” free license – Inventor.