Windchill 11.1 Licensing Lessons Learned and Best Practices
Hi,
We have completed an upgrade from WC 10.1 to 11.1 and are now working through licensing. Our guestimate for licensing was defined last December while negotiating our renewal contract with PTC. Unfortunately, Windchill 10.1 does not have any license tools, so there was no way to know what the true need would be.
iRobot is a typical MCAD/ECAD/PLM customer running Creo and Windchill. The additional modules we have are Partslink, Supplier Management and Product Analytics for Cost.
Now that we've upgraded, a few things have come to light that are not apparent on the support pages. Most importantly, don't underestimate the true number of Author licenses you'll need. The Contributor license sounds good, but it is strictly limited to document checkout/checkin and participation in tasks.
- Partslink and Supplier Management are required for every Author license
(this is part of the purchase agreement) - Partslink and/or Supplier Management CANNOT be added to a Contributor license
(they are required to have an Author license) - Mechanical Design I CANNOT be added to Contributor license
(CAD viewers or consumers are required to have an Author license) - A Creo Parametric session cannot be connected to Windchill without an Author license
(regardless of permissions or intent, you must have an Author license for CAD) - Users assigned the Contributor license will not be able to use Route in ProjectLink
(document management users are required to have an Author license) - ECAD Data Management can only be added to an Author license
(same rules as Creo, you must have an Author license for ECAD)
Besides these findings, we're also struggling with how to handle users with more than one account? Windchill does not allow you to add/remove permissions dynamically (like Atlassian), so we create second accounts for people. We have folks on a program team that also manage the program's container. Rather than putting their "regular" user account into the PM role, we create a second account prefixed with PM_. If they need to do some administrative task, they log in with their PM_ account to do it. Is this a valid use of the License Exclusion list?
Knowing what I know now, I'd highly recommend getting an 11.1+ system setup and start evaluating the licensing rules as soon as possible if you are considering an upgrade. You'll be surprised at how many licenses you'll really need.
If you're in the same situation or have other tips-n-tricks to share, please reply to this message to help out others. Maybe a macro or script to reformat the licensing report to a usable spread sheet 😉
-Scott