borrow license for more than 14 days

fmueller · ‎02-22-2016

For some users usually working in the company network with floating CAD-licenses, it is important on e.g. during an on-site installation to be able to work with Creo to open CAD models for a longer period than the 14days currently available for borrowing. Therefore 14 days seems an unnecessary and serious limitation of the flexnet-license server.

This idea proposes to unlimit the duration for borrowing a license or at least to set the maximum limitation to a much longer period e.g. 150 or even 365 days.

This will not affect PTC's sales possiblilities for licenses because there is already a workaround, by having one license and one license server running with a small exchangeable USB-network-card on the CAD-laptop.

In my feeling as user it would even increase the satisfaction with this nice piece of CAD-software if such an operation would not need a workaround but would be natively supported and easy to use.

P.S. As I can see, quite a few people were intrested and reading this idea. I would like to ask anybody who reads it and agrees with me, not to forget to vote for it. Otherwise it might not be considered by PTC.

BenLoosli · ‎02-22-2016

The workaround is to move a license from your server pool to be standalone on the laptop. When the laptop is not going on the road for a while, move the license back to the server pool. Might be a little extra work, but avoids hitting a license expiration while on the road. Where I used to work, we put all laptops on standalone licenses and only desktop workstations used the license pool.

fmueller · ‎02-23-2016

Putting all Laptops with a standalone license is unforunately not a practicable solution for us. Also not the buerocratic paperwork which needs to be done for relicensing to another MAC-Adress. So we always hope, that traveling for more than 14days can be avoided. This limitation is really a disadvantage against competitors. As we can read here modify proe_borrow.bat for borrowing more than 14 days other CAD vendors do longer borrowing with the same license manager!

Please don't forget to vote 😉 here

STEVEG · ‎03-11-2016

It definitely should be increased.

JimBarrettSmith · ‎03-15-2016

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your comments and votes. I am looking into increasing the borrow time but the question is what should be the default and for what reason. If you could provide the use case it would certainly help me make the case for selecting a specific period

So which option and for what reason

1) 30 days - 1 month

2) 60 days - 2 months

3) 90 days - 3 months

4) 120 days - 4 months

5) 180 days - 6 months

I look forward to your comments, Jim

BenLoosli · ‎03-15-2016

I think the default should still be a short time since I think that would cover 90% of the travel cases. Make it 10 days, check out Friday, be gone a week and it will expire on the second Monday. Longer periods, or shorter, would still be available for those other trips.

fmueller · ‎03-16-2016

Dear Ben,

I disagree with you. In our business we are designing cusomized research instruments and it is usual that the designers are also the ones who are installing the equipment at the customers site. During such an installation it happens that you need to look for certain dimensions or you need to make final adaptations to interfaces to existin equipment or similar. So you need a real CAD-System not just pdf-drawings or a viewer.

Such site installations may take for instance 6 weeks. Sometimes they are on other continents or simply far away. Not always you have a fast and reliable internet connection to borrow a new period of just 14days. Sometimes even customers security regulationd does not allow you to connect your CAD-Laptop via VPN with your Server at home.

That means we may simply not able to work when such an installation takes longer than two weeks. For that reason our workaround in former years was to license one of our floating licenses to a USB-LAN-Card and take that LAN-Card with us. This is however a pain, because when coming back you need to get that license back in the pool using a second flexnet-server that runs with the USB-LAN-Card. This is really not a practicable way and therefore we currently do have all licenses again on one Flexnet server and hope that we either have not such long installations or we have an internet connection fast enough to allow renew the borrowing via VPN.

My personal feeling is, that it was just a political decision by PTC not to allow longer periods. I can't understand that, because there are workarounds fully covered with the license conditions. My feeling is that PTC could gain customers satisfaction when it would allow longer borrowing periods or loose that satisfaction when it forces the customer to go complicated workarounds. As I have learnt from the discussions here in the community, other CAD-vendors with the same license server are allowing longer periods so I don't believe that just technical limitations of the Flexnet-server are the reason. So I am grateful to Jim wo seems actually to look into the details and consider the possibilities PTC have.

Dear Jim,

My personal favorite from your proposal above is: Leave it configurable but make the longest allowed period as long as technically (and politically 😉 ) possible e.g. 180days. So everyone can just choose the borrowing length by the duration of his trip. The current problem now is mainly the limitation of the max. borrowing period to just 15days.

Even better - if not perfect - would it be, to allow the user an "early return" of the borrowed license when the laptop is back in the network. This is something Autodesk does. You can just give back the borrowed license as soon as you don't need it anymore. So you could borrow a little longer than you actually need. Sometimes one has to extend an busines trip for reasons that were not foreseen. I would then just borrow for one week longer that I have planned my trip. In case I came back as planned I would then simply "early return" the borrowed license. In case I need a week longer than planned it doesn't matter and I do not have to worry about the availibility of my CAD-program.

STEVEG · ‎03-16-2016

Frieder,

Unless I am reading your response wrong Ben wasn't suggesting to keep the maximum amount of time short. He was replying to the question of what the "default value" should be. Ben suggests keeping the default short but still allow longer periods of time.

BenLoosli · ‎03-16-2016

I agree that the LONGEST time should be what Flexera has which is 183 days, I think.

I only said the DEFAULT should be 10 days, but allow you to set any time length up to the software maximum.

Early return is allowed, so that issue has been addressed and solved.

STEVEG · ‎03-16-2016

I think as a default it should still be a short period of time. 7 10 or 14 days as the default should be fine.

fmueller · ‎03-16-2016

@BEN

thank you for clarification. I agree for the default, that 7days or 10days seems a practicable default value that can be changed to shorter or longer periods.

Could you please give some more details about an early return? As far as I know from the PTC documentation that is not foreseen and not possible so far.

BenLoosli · ‎03-16-2016

Posted in another Borrow License thread by Martin Hanak on 19 Feb 2016:

according to https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS31332, borrowed licenses can be returned early starting from:

Creo Elements/Pro 5.0 M150
Creo Parametric 1.0 M050
Creo Parametric 2.0 M020

fmueller · ‎03-16-2016

@BEN

many thanks for this useful link.

@Jim

the link to the early return describes a command line way - which is in my point of view not practicable for all CAD users. Maybe PTC can combine borrowing and early returnin in one common ans simple to use GUI?

What about having in Creo a command button "borrow license", where the user can define the number of tays he/she want.

If the system "sees" its home network environment with the flexnet server again Creo could even ask the user if he/she wants to return the borrowed license. Otherwise a comand button "Return borrowed license" in Creo would do it.

JimBarrettSmith · ‎03-22-2016

All

Thank you for your feedback. I am happy to inform you (subject to change without notice) PTC will increase the borrowing time by summer 2016.

As soon as the improvements to the borrowing time are available for I will post all the details.

I will also investigate how we can improve the early return of borrowed licenses.

Thanks to your feedback on this subject I feel feedback such as this can really help us make a difference.

thanks

jim

STEVEG · ‎03-22-2016

That is fantastic news. Thank you Jim.

fmueller · ‎03-23-2016

Hi Jim,

that's very good news. Thank you very much for looking into the details and listening to the "strange requirements" some odd customers/users like us have.

I know that life for the programmers would be much easier if there were no customer/user. I hope however that it only makes your product better and even more competitive.

Thanks again

Frieder

TomU · ‎03-28-2016

Jim Barrett-Smith‌,

I see PTC has released the details:

Can I ask why perpetual license holders will not get the same borrowing duration as subscription customers? I have to believe that > 95% of all Creo commercial licenses are currently perpetual.

Thanks.

STEVEG · ‎03-28-2016

That is very curious about the two different license types.

bedmonds · ‎03-29-2016

Tom - PTC is transitioning its business model from perpetual to subscription licenses. You are correct that the majority of our customers own perpetual licenses today, but that ratio is changing, and changing rapidly. There are many business benefits to subscription, which are enumerated more fully on PTC.com. From a product perspective, there are many benefits as well. We launched new subscription-only Creo packages in January that include 40 hours of eLearning, and Mathcad subscription-only packages that include worksheet templates, an animator tool and an SDK. We will continue to add capabilities and content to our subscription-only packages, further differentiating them from our perpetual offerings over time. The difference in limits for license borrowing is another example - an additional benefit of being on a subscription license is a longer borrowing window. But we've set both to meet the needs of all of our customers.

STEVEG · ‎03-30-2016

The only reason it's changing rapidly is because of the costs savings. Once the majority of users change I'll bet the perpetual licensing goes away and the cost for subscriptions will rise rapidly to the point there wouldn't be much, if any, difference.

TomU · ‎03-30-2016

Is there a cost savings? I did an preliminary analysis back in December that showed the subscription model costing more, potentially much more. Not sure if the pricing structure has changed since then...

See Re: Subscription Licensing (w/o Cloud) VS Perpetual Licensing (w/o Cloud)

dgschaefer · ‎03-30-2016

The immediate out of pocket costs are lower, but in the long term it's much more costly. and the way it's structured, the normal benefits of subscriptions (flexibilty, primarily) are gone. You must sign up for a 12 month commitment, it auto renews and you must give a written notice of termination months or weels ahead of the end of your subscription terms (that's from memory, I may have the details wrong)

dgschaefer · ‎03-31-2016

Brent Edmonds‌ I'd like to hear what benefits there are to subscription licensing from a customer standpoint. The only one I can see is the upfront expenditure. It still locks you into a minimum 12 month commitment and in the end it will cost more.

Now, if PTC is providing additional features and services to offset that extra cost, I guess that's a benefit (although the things you list aren't very valuable to us). From the perspective of customers that have been paying PTC for decades (my small company has paid over a half a million dollars to PTC in maintenance alone over the years), it's a bit of slap in the face to see these kinds of benefits denied or limited for us, particularly enhancements like extended license borrowing.

fmueller · ‎04-04-2016

Dear All,

I agree with Doug, that this announcement feels like a slap in the face for customers like us who have a perpetual license and would like to stay with this license type! When I originally wrote this idea I really did not intend that PTC makes such a favor to subscription license models.

I'd still ask PTC to re-think with their sales team their arguments. In my feeling, the PTC arguments make now really clear, that there is no technical issue that limits the borrowing time. It now feels really like a sales "trick" to "persuade" customers to switch to the new license model. Perhaps it was never a technical issue in the past and also just a sales issue to sell an additional license just for traveling wherever possible.

PTCModerator · ‎06-14-2018

BenLoosli · ‎06-14-2018

The status of this request should be changed to Current Functionality. It has been done for 2 years.