Why are licenses required for "View Only" users?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
October 15, 2020
2 replies
3285 views

We have users like "purchasing agents" who only log into Windchill to grab a .pdf of a drawing to send to a supplier. They don't create objects, or kick off any workflows and yet we are required to pay $300 a year for a license for them. This seems rather pathetic and greedy for PTC. There should be an out of the box Profile like "guest" that is read only that admins can assign users to that doesn't require a license.

Licensing

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BenLoosli

23-Emerald III

Because they have to utilize code that PTC developed to access the database.

CreoView is a no cost software, as is Windchill.

The only revenue stream PTC gets from these products is to sell licenses to access the code.

Prior to 11.1, licenses were not checked. Our original system admin put everyone into Windchill, almost 400 users at the time. As we approach 11.1 installation, we removed almost 300 user names from Windchill and had to buy a mix of new Author and View licenses.

T

TomU

23-Emerald IV

It's the classic, "If I paid to create the data (in Creo), and I paid again to store the data (in Windchill), why do I have to pay again to view the data? Software companies are in the business of making money, and they are going to do that any way they can. A couple of options:

1.) Store copies of the data (like PDFs) outside of Windchill. Dump them to a shared network drive or someplace else that can be accessed by anyone without needing a Windchill license. It is possible with a small add-on (or your own customization) to get Windchill to automatically export these files every time something is created or updated.

2.) Get a block of 'Active Daily User' licenses for Windchill. Each of these licenses will allow a 'view-only' type user to access Windchill for a 24 hour period. At midnight the license becomes available again for someone else to use. If you have a large group of very infrequent users, a small number of these licenses can work very well. (We have 10 of them covering roughly 200 occasional users and they are almost never all in use at the same time.)

T

ThomasB

Author

1-Visitor

TomU

I'm very interested to learn more about this Active Daily user license. We only have 130 users that occasionally access Windchill for downloading a file.

2.) Get a block of 'Active Daily User' licenses for Windchill. Each of these licenses will allow a 'view-only' type user to access Windchill for a 24 hour period. At midnight the license becomes available again for someone else to use. If you have a large group of very infrequent users, a small number of these licenses can work very well. (We have 10 of them covering roughly 200 occasional users and they are almost never all in use at the same time.)