Windchill Licensing

Windchill requires a valid license to run in the system. The license contains all your Windchill entitlements. Windchill users are entitled to a license through license group membership. The access to the entitled feature will be limited to the count of purchased licenses.

There is no limitation to the number of servers such as Test and Development, that can be set up, but each Windchill instance requires its own license file.

• Licensing is exempted for Windchill PDM Essentials, Windchill Arbortext Content Manager and PTC Pro/INTRALINK 11.X.

• Licensing is exempted for Remote File Servers.

Windchill supports the following types of license, based on the duration for which you can purchase a license:

• Perpetual license — A permanent license that you do not need to renew once you purchase it. The perpetual license type supports the Named license model.

• Subscription license — A license that is valid for a fixed period. Once the license period expires you can renew the license for an additional fixed period. The subscription type of license supports both Named and Active Daily User license model.

For information on named user license model and active daily user license model, see Behavior of User Licenses.

Licenses can be retrieved and managed in online mode or manual mode, as described here:

◦ Enables automatic retrieval of license using PTC Solution Installer during installation or from the License Management utility in Windchill after installation.

◦ Manages the license subscriptions and any changes in license entitlements automatically. Every 24 hours Windchill synchronizes with PTC backend system and checks for any changes in license entitlements.

Use this mode when your Windchill instance operates in offline mode or is unable to communicate with PTC backend system.

◦ Provides the ability to retrieve license manually using License Management utility in Windchill after installation.

◦ Provides the ability to manage license subscriptions and any changes in license entitlements manually.

On successful activation of your license, the license features purchased are displayed in the License Information tab of theLicense Management utility in Windchill.

Administrators are required to add users to the respective license group in order to entitle the users to a license.

Upon start-up and every 24 hours, Windchill synchronizes with PTC backend system and checks for valid license. If the license is invalid or the subscription term has expired, then Windchill shuts down. A grace period of six hours is provided by PTC before shutting down the Windchill instance. In the case of cluster environment, Windchill will shut down in all the nodes. Administrators are presented with notification message before shut down.

If Windchill is unable to synchronize with PTC backend system, but has valid license file locally , then Windchill will continue to run.

At the time of login, users who are members of the administrators group are presented with a notification message for the following conditions:

The administrator group members will also receive email notification about license expiration or details about features that are due for expiration.

Administrators will receive notification about expiration at the following intervals:

License notifications are presented on user interface in the following ways:

• A notification banner is displayed on with a message at the time of login. A sample is given below.

• A bell icon

is displayed with license notifications count on the Windchill browser page. Click this icon to open the License Notifications tab in the License Management utility. You can view all license related notification information in the License Notifications tab.

In addition to above, notification message is displayed in the Methodserver log if Windchill is not configured with a valid license.