Windchill Licensing
Windchill requires a valid license to run in the system. The license contains all your Windchill entitlements. Windchill users must be entitled to a license through license group membership. The license group membership provides access to Windchill. If user is not a member of any license group, then access to Windchill is denied.
The access to the entitled feature will be limited to the count of purchased licenses.
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Users can access Windchill only if they are added to the license group associated with the license that has been purchased for them.
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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.
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• Licensing is exempted for Windchill PDM Essentials, Arbortext Content Manager and Pro/INTRALINK 11.X.
• Licensing is exempted for Remote File Servers.
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Supported Windchill License Types
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.
Retrieving and Managing License
Licenses can be retrieved and managed in online mode or manual mode, as described here:
• Online mode
◦ Enables automatic retrieval of license using PTC Solution Installer during installation or from the License Management utility in Windchill after installation.
◦ Automates the license management lifecycle.
◦ 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.
• Offline or Manual mode
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.
License Validation and Shutdown Behavior
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.
License Notifications
Users who are members of the administrator group receive license related notifications for the following conditions:
• Windchill license or a license feature is due to expire in 30 days
If Windchill license or any license feature is expiring in 30 days, administrators will receive notification at following intervals:
◦ 30 days before expiration
◦ 15 days before expiration
◦ Every day before 7 days of expiration
• Windchill license is expired or not acquired
If Windchill license is expired or Windchill is not configured with a valid license at the time of login, administrators will receive notifications at every start of the method server or background method servers.
• Windchill licenses are over-allocated
If the allocated quantity of Windchill licenses exceed the purchased quantity of licenses in any of the license groups, administrators will receive notifications every day until the excess users are removed from the respective license groups.
• Windchill license entitlements are updated
If Windchill license is acquired and there are updates to the license entitlements, then administrators will receive notification with the details of newly acquired license entitlements. Updates to license entitlement may include:
◦ Addition or removal of existing license features
◦ Change in purchased quantity of license
◦ Change in expiration date of an existing license feature
◦ License is acquired for the first time and updated with entitlements
For all the above conditions, administrators will receive notifications in the following ways:
• Email notification is sent to the members of administrator group.
• Notification messages are displayed in the License Notifications tab in the License Management utility.
Notification Alerts
If there are license notifications, the alerts are presented on user interface in one of 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.
A sample is given below.
In addition to above, notification message is displayed in the Methodserver log if Windchill is not configured with a valid license.
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