Previously, the following individual products were offered for wastewater collection system modeling with gravity flow and/or pressurized flow:  

• SewerCAD Standalone 
• SewerGEMS 

These products share many common elements, including the file format and aspects of the standalone interface. Consolidating into a single product line will eliminate the need for users to purchase multiple standalone licenses while enabling us to serve these users more efficiently and improve the buying and user experience. 

SewerGEMS users who utilize the product exclusively for stormwater modeling are encouraged to review the OpenFlows Storm product consolidation page. During this one-time upgrade transition, we will allow SewerGEMS users to take advantage of the migration path documented in this article to OpenFlows Sewer OR opt for a migration path to OpenFlows Storm documented in the linked article. 

The following products outlined in the table titled OpenFlows Sewer: Capabilities by Tier below this FAQ will be consolidated into a new product license/subscription offering. Please note that as a result of this consolidation, future licensing and usage of the OpenFlows products will utilize the consolidated product lineup effective July 1, 2024.  

All current commercial models (perpetual licenses under SELECT subscriptions; Virtuoso subscriptions; term licensing; and Enterprise 365 (E365), EPS 365, and ELS subscriptions) will continue to be available for the new OpenFlows Sewer product line. 

All users on active contracts for OpenFlows SewerCAD and SewerGEMS are impacted by this change. Existing users can continue to use the product versions and feature levels they are currently using. There is not a need to reinstall products or select different feature levels. Depending on your contract, the benefits and timing of consolidation impacts will vary. Please read the response below to the question "How does this change impact existing contracts and license entitlements?"

These changes will NOT impact users with inactive (non-SELECT) perpetual licenses or users of non-commercial versions such as those available via our textbooks. 

This consolidation is part of a Bentley initiative to simplify our product portfolio and improve the buying and user experience for our products. We've received frequent questions about the overlap and difference in functionality between our legacy products SewerCAD and SewerGEMS, with specific confusion about the integration of these products within CAD and GIS platforms. 

Additionally, the licensing of these products sometimes created confusion in terms of selecting the "pipe level" and the inclusion (or not) of the AutoCAD integration from the separate "Feature Level Selector" tool. This consolidation should minimize the confusion in the future so that users can more easily utilize the appropriate license tier for their contract and project. 

After the consolidation, users will:  

• Better understand what's included in the licenses and be able to determine what licenses are necessary for their work. 
• Have the capability to run in standalone mode as well as using multi-platform integration with common CAD and GIS software (Advanced and Ultimate tiers only)  
• Have a price range that enables cost efficiency when modeling smaller systems.  

Additionally, users in the Advanced tier will benefit by having access to both the GVF Convex method native to the legacy SewerCAD product and the St. Venant-based solvers (Implicit and SWMM) included in SewerGEMS. Additionally, the new simplified billing will help users better understand the impact on project costs. 

Users with enterprise and term-license enabled contracts will have access to the expanded functionality of the new product line when the administrative change takes place in July 2024. Effective July 1, 2024, all term license and enterprise license usage will be allocated under the new product tiers and pricing. Users of prior version products and discontinued feature levels will be charged according to the product equivalent in the table below. 

All SELECT and Virtuoso subscriptions will be subject to the new product name and yearly price established by the consolidation, effective upon their renewal anniversary. SELECT users may enjoy the expanded functionality of the new product tiers before renewal; however, continued access to the new product tiers will require renewal of the SELECT contract for at least one year. SELECT subscriptions that are not renewed will have perpetual licenses issued only for the originally owned product and feature level and not any additional products or increased feature limits or functionality gained by the consolidated product. Virtuoso subscribers will only have access to the expanded functionality after renewal. 

If you have any questions about this consolidation that aren't addressed in any of our Communities pages linked above, we encourage you to engage with our webchat on www.bentley.com, where a member of our team will guide you through any remaining inquiries you may have.  

Bentley's Subscription Entitlement Services allow you to set threshold limits to trigger warnings when you're about to overuse a license. However, following this consolidation, you should reset the threshold limits for this new license based on your new entitlements, even if you had previously set the threshold limits for the individual legacy applications. If you do not reset your threshold limits, your engineers will not be notified when they're about to overuse the number of licenses you're entitled to.   

If you previously licensed SewerCAD and SewerGEMS separately, those license pools may be combined depending upon which equivalent OpenFlows Sewer tier (Essentials, Standard, Advanced, Ultimate) is reached upon upgrade. For more information on how to update these threshold limits in the Subscription Entitlement Service (SES) Entitlement Management center, please visit this Communities page: https://bentleysystems.service-now.com/community?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0019019 

We strongly advise account admins to reset these threshold limits before installing and running OpenFlows Sewer 2024.  

Note that because the quarterly term license fees (the overuse charges) are now based on the new OpenFlows product equivalent and license price rather than on the legacy product and the old license price, concurrent usage fees have the potential to affect a larger base of users than in the past (though depending upon your renewal process, your license count will also increase to reflect the total quantities of all subproducts).

Similarly, if you previously had Default Access set to deny access to all products except for a list of exceptions, your Administrator will need to change this in Entitlement Management to allow access to the new products.

What if I already own both SewerCAD and SewerGEMS or if I use SewerGEMS exclusively for stormwater modeling? 

Existing users of SewerCAD and SewerGEMS will see each license they own upgraded to a license of OpenFlows Sewer with a tier (Essentials, Standard, Advanced, Ultimate) equivalent to the license they own today. This means that users who license both SewerCAD and SewerGEMS (or any combination of included products and feature levels) will receive an equivalent license of OpenFlows Sewer (see below table) for each license currently active in SELECT or via Virtuoso subscription.  

For instance, a user with one active license for SewerCAD 1000 pipes and SewerGEMS unlimited pipes will upgrade to having an OpenFlows Sewer Standard license (equivalent to the SewerCAD 1000 pipes) and an OpenFlows Sewer Ultimate license (equivalent to SewerGEMS unlimited pipes). Since OpenFlows Sewer Ultimate includes the functionality of both SewerGEMS and SewerCAD, this user may decide to keep only the OpenFlows Sewer Ultimate license or they may decide to keep both, depending upon the number of users and the need for concurrency. 

Your initial renewal statement will always have a one-for-one license equivalency. Once you receive the initial statement, you may wish to consult with your Bentley renewals representative to determine the optimal number of licenses to move forward with, considering your users' needs and any redundancies in the consolidated product line. The following diagram indicates a typical renewal involving both SewerCAD and SewerGEMS. 

Note that if you use SewerGEMS exclusively for stormwater modeling, you should consult with your Bentley renewals representative to determine if OpenFlows Storm is a better fit for you than OpenFlows Sewer. We will accommodate license migration of SewerGEMS to either new platform, but functional considerations are needed to determine which is appropriate for your users. 

After July 1, 2024, any usage of the existing products SewerCAD and SewerGEMS will automatically be recorded as usage of their corresponding OpenFlows Sewer tier. All users with owned perpetual licenses can continue using those licenses without any upgrade or reinstallation of the product. Entitlements to licenses will also automatically be updated to enable usage of the appropriate OpenFlows Sewer tier. 

Any users in enterprise contracts or contracts using term licensing should be aware that continued use of pre-consolidation product versions and feature levels will be recorded as usage of the new product line (and appropriate tier) and term license and enterprise pricing will exist ONLY for the new product levels. For instance, a user continuing to use SewerCAD 2000 pipes can continue to use the product and feature level, but under term licensing and enterprise contracts that usage will show in reporting and invoice as use of OpenFlows Sewer Advanced.

Following July 1, 2024, all new releases of SewerCAD and SewerGEMS will be made available under the installation for OpenFlows Sewer. There will not be a need to download these subproducts separately.

Versions of SewerCAD and SewerGEMS available before July 1, 2024, will remain in the individual download pages for those products. OpenFlows Sewer will have releases from July 1 and beyond.

We always encourage our users to use the latest product version to take advantage of functional and security improvements. Users are not required to migrate to using OpenFlows Sewer, but those who don't will miss out on the latest product updates. 

We recognize that many of our users will want to continue using pre-July 1 versions of SewerCAD and SewerGEMS for various reasons. We will continue to support of these products through our standard support life cycle. Currently, no date has been set to retire these products. 

You may continue accessing SewerGEMS at your current feature level through the remaining duration of your subscription. When your subscription renews, it will automatically renew as the new OpenFlows WorkSuite subscription at the appropriate tier. Users subscribing to the unlimited pipes Water WorkSuite will renew with the OpenFlows WorkSuite Ultimate, which packages OpenFlows Water Ultimate and OpenFlows Sewer Ultimate. Similarly, users subscribing to the 5,000 pipe Water WorkSuite will renew with OpenFlows WorkSuite Advanced, which packages OpenFlows Water Advanced and OpenFlows Sewer Advanced.  

Users subscribing to the 1,000 pipe Water WorkSuite are the only ones who will see different functionality as well as a lower price – they will renew with OpenFlows WorkSuite Standard, which will require them to uninstall WaterGEMS and SewerGEMS and install OpenFlows Water Standard and OpenFlows Sewer Standard, which do not include GIS integration and some advanced functionality. See the table in the below section for the functional differences between the Standard and Advanced tiers. 

NOTE: The current OpenFlows Water WorkSuite and future OpenFlows WorkSuite are currently available only via Virtuoso Subscription. 

The pricing impacts of this product transition will vary significantly depending on which products and tiers you currently license. For many users, the new product pricing will be consistent with their current subscription costs.  Other users may have an increased cost but will have gained product functionality and/or the ability to analyze larger systems.  

We encourage you to engage with our webchat on http://www.bentley.com, where a member of our team will guide you through any remaining inquiries you may have. Also, note that you will get a renewal advice summary detailing changes well in advance of your renewal date.