How does Windchill Licence Work ?

[rnatrajan]

Iam curious to know how does Windchill Licence Work ?

Say, if i Have 2 "Heavy User" and 2 "Light User" licence does that mean:

1) Fixed 4 users can access Windchill ?

or

2) At a given point of time any 4 users from a set of users can access windchill ?

Also whats the diference between Heavy and Light user licence? Also how to check licence usage?

We will be using Windchill 10 M030

Thanks,

Rakesh

[avillanueva]

Honor system but PTC can audit anytime. Heavy vs. Light vs. other are a
ratio generally negotiated with sales rep. This does not affect any
functionality in the system meaning that there is no coupling between a
user and a specific license.

[BrianGeary]

It's based on a named user, so each individual uses up one license. Contrast this to concurrent licensing schemes like Wildfire where you can have 20 people using 10 licenses as long as only 10
people are using the software at the same time.

A Windchill license is consumed from the moment you create an account for the user, and the license is released when that user is obsoleted and deactivated, meaning they can't login anymore because
you changed their password to something they don't know.

As far as heavy vs light, this is an arbitrary ratio that PTC wants you to buy. The theory is that CAD users are heavy users and non-CAD administrative types are light users.

To check license usage, there is a utility you can run on the server but the name of it escapes me at the moment. We wrote our own JSP page that reports on license usage so we don't typically run
PTCs tool, but we do from time to time just to make sure we're in compliance.

Hope this helps...

Brian Geary
Java Architect
Information Technology

hermanmiller.com
616 654 8993 OFFICE
616 796 5257 MOBILE

HermanMiller

[SteveBarnhart]

PTC's customer agreement goes into detail about the licensing basis for Windchill (named user) and also the difference between types (Heavy, Light, External...). You can access the current agreement here: http://www.ptc.com/support/customer_agreements/click_wrap_files/Clickwrap_09_en.pdf

You can do a self assessment of license usage in Windchill (Site>Utilities>License Usage Reporting). This gives a high level overview per month and you can drill down a bit to see the per hour data. If you want more detail,such as who logged into what context and howmany times,run a custom report and process it externally (Site>Utilities>Security Audit Reporting). You'll want to choose 'Context Logon' or 'Login' for audit event.