Work with more than one session on the same computer, especially for CAM

[INF-EA]

Many of our customer want to work with more than one session on the same computer. They want to create toolpaths for machining while other open session is calculating any other toolpath. They also need to make step by step check for manufacturing with the same file names.

[JonathanHodgson]

There are a number of good reasons to run multiple sessions of basic Pro/E, too.
http://communities.ptc.com/message/175270#175270

[MartinHanak]

If you buy 1 ProE license -> you can run 1 session.

If you buy 2 ProE licenses -> you can run 2 sessions.

If you buy 3 ProE licenses -> you can run 3 sessions.

and so on

[JonathanHodgson]

... which is pretty much impossible to justify, given the price of a licence, and IMHO pretty much indefensible.

If I buy Microsoft Office, there are no limitations on working on multiple documents in Word, or on running Word and Powerpoint at the same time.  Perhaps more relevant, if I pay for licence points for Altair software, I can run as many instances of Hypermesh as I like on the same computer for just one set of points.

Why should we pay per CPU thread (effectively), rather than per user?

[dgschaefer]

Absolutely, one license per workstation, no matter now many sessions of Pro/E are running.  I'd even say I should be able to use WF4 & WF5 on the same license on the same machine.

BTW - Erol, you should vote on your own idea.

[MartinHanak]

I remembered that ... you can also buy LOCKED license of Creo Parametric. This kind of license is uncounted - i.e. you can launch multiple sessions of Creo Parametric on single PC.

[JonathanHodgson]

I was going to suggest that it could be mostly fixed by having each window of a Pro/E session run in a separate thread, so that when one is processing you can still work on another.  I picture this removing the current 'active window' behaviour - any window would be active as soon as you clicked in it, as well as if it was doing something in the background.

However, there are actually good reasons for wanting to run multiple different sessions concurrently, perhaps with different configs or even in different versions as Doug mentions.  So, back to Plan A, please.

[JonathanHodgson]

Here's another situation: I've got two similar (but different) versions of customer-supplied data, and I'm trying to compare them and ultimately merge certain elements from one into the other.

Running them in separate sessions is the only way, as there may be identical part numbers in the two sets of data but the models may not be identical.  The only other way is to open one, look at it, close it and erase, then open the other... I got bored of that after about the third swap.  Fortunately we use floating licences and they aren't very heavily used today.

[olivierlp]

Hello,

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