Windchill license groups are available at the site level to help your company manage your license compliance with the licenses you purchased. As these groups represent different usage scenarios for Windchill, some are established with some out-of-the-box access control rules for the groups that match the description for each Windchill license. Most license groups are a member of a license profile; for example, the PTC View and Print Only License group is a member of the PTC View and Print Only License profile. The license profiles enable and restrict visibility to actions and user interface elements throughout Windchill based on the functionality that the license represents. The license profile settings are extended to users by adding them to the license group, which is in turn a member of the license profile. When you have purchased a particular license for a user, you should add that user to the appropriate license group.

You can use license groups in the same way you would use any other user-defined group. Group membership can be managed at the site level. To manage the group at a lower level, your site administrator can add a user-defined group to the license group. For example, an organization-level user defined group called View and Print Users could be created and added to the PTC View and Print Only License group by the site administrator. Then an organization administrator could add users or other user-defined groups to the View and Print Users group and the profile settings and access control rules defined for the PTC View and Print Only License group would apply to those users.

The following license groups are added at the site level and are included out of the box.

The PTC Author License provides a base set of capabilities and is a prerequisite to all licenses except the PTC Contributor license and the PTC SLM packages licenses. To get the full capabilities entitled to a user, the user should be added to the PTC Author License group and to the group for their additional purchased license. For example, if a PTC Manufacturing License is purchased for a user, then the user should be added to the PTC Author License group and the PTC Manufacturing License group. This extends the two license profiles to that user, allowing the user to take full advantage of the capabilities licensed for that user.

For more information about the licenses associated with these license groups, refer to PTC marketing materials. For information about license profiles, see Profiles.