Licence clarification

[acoates]

Hi. Can anybody please confirm whether the following licenses come free with the system or whether they come from the pot of Print & View and Heavy user that one purchases:

• Site Administrator;
• Organisation Administrator;
• Publisher Administrator.

Many thanks.

[BenLoosli]

Those are not licenses but users with Windchill. They are required for setting up Windchill.

OOTB install only establishes the Site Administrator. The others can be easily created.

[acoates]

OK, sorry, poor phrasing on my part. Do the users for Site, Publish and Org Admins get taken from your purchased pool or, since they are fundamental to Windchill being able to work, can they be overlooked in your user count?

[BenLoosli]

Windchill is a per user license from the LDAP. Those are 3 'roles' within Windchill and they could be handled by just 1 LDAP user account.

If you assign 3 LDAP users to each role then, yes, you are using 3 of your 'licenses'.

You could set up 3 accounts for yourself for each role in Windchill. I would argue with PTC that it is only 1 user, just using different logins to limit the rights that each role has within Windchill.

[TomU]

Practically, how do you do that?  How would you create a single user in Windchill DS but have Windchill ask you which "role" you want to use when logging in?

[BenLoosli]

You can't do it the way you ask, Tom.

You can assign the rights of Site Admin, Org Admin and Publisher Admin to a single LDAP user account.

Thus, one login has all of the rights to perform the functions of the 3 admins.

[TomU]

That makes sense, but I thought somewhere I had read that PTC recommended against allowing the Org Admin account from having Site Admin permissions.  Also, more in line with the original question, what happens when the Site Admin is also a normal CAD user.  Surely they're not going to do their normal daily cad work as the Site Admin.  The logical solution is two separate LDAP entries - one as the Site Admin and one with their normal username.  Since this is still the same person in both "roles", are two separate Heavy User licenses required?

[BenLoosli]

I do have separate LDAP entries for Site admin (wcadmin) and Org Admin (orgadmin) and I have my personal account which is also a site admin and an org admin, plus others. I use my personal account for almost all of my interaction with Windchill daily.

[TomU]

So do I. 

The question is, are we burning up 3 heavy user licenses or just 1, since the same physical person is behind all three accounts?

[acoates]

Exactly. I've heard that the Publisher Admin uses a Print and View licence, but I'm still seething (although not surprised) form the fact that PTC recommends that you use three licences for functions that are absolutely required for the system to work.

[Dan_Harlan]

I have been told by multiple PTC and VAR salesmen and PTC regional managers that admin accounts do not count against your license counts. This does not mean that your windchill admin gets a free license, but that s/he should have their own named account and that if they do, then wcadmin, wvsadmin, etc are not considered users for licensing purposes.

This goes so far to say that if you are both the admin and an engineer/heavy user, you can have two accounts, such as "dan" and "dan_admin" and the admin account does not count. This allows you to have your normal account in which you work like an engineer, and an admin account which you access only when you are acting like an admin.

[acoates]

Well that's a pleasant surprise for a Monday morning, thanks!