Intralink 8.0 and licensing

[tjallen29]

I am having a difficult time finding a simple straightforward answer to the question of how licensing works in Intralink 8.0.

Currently we're running Intralink 3.3 with a FlexLM server. We have roughly 25 seats of Intralink which 50 users are registered to use. This is an obvious cost advantage because many of the users are occasional users, needing to log on for 5 minutes at a time, etc. Rarely do we come up against exceeding our licenses at any one time.

Now comes along Intralink 8.0. PTC claims that the licenses are still floating or "concurrent", yet there is no FlexLM server to control them. Does this still mean that we can register as many users as we'd like, regardless of number of licenses as long as we stay under the concurrent usage, in the "honor system" sense?

Or, does it require that we purchase extra licenses to that every user has their own license, effectively making the move to Intralink 8.0 prohibitively expensive?

 

[looslib]

Technically, Intralink8 uses a named-user licensing. Each user account has to have a license.


Actually, Intralink 8 does no license checking, either concurrent or named.


Honor system is the only control today.

 

[kdmgooner]

I too had this problem, not being sure if we were legal or not and trying to get a straight answer is nigh on impossible. Anyway, this is how I understand it works:


Users with a CAD application be it PROE, AutoCAD or CATIA etc are known as heavy PDM Link users. Users who just log in to get info or maybe change a few things, look at Product View etc are known as light PDM Link users.


If your PROE licences include a PDM Link license (eg Flex3C does) then you get 1 "free" heavy user license for each Flex3C user. If your Intralink licenses are not part of your PROE license then you get 1 "free" light user license for each Intralink license and you should upgrade these at a cost to allow AutoCAD, CATIA users to use them. We had 8 Flex3C licences and 7 Intralink 3.x licenses so we had to upgrade the 3.x ones


If you are using a nonPTC CAD system such as AutoCAD you must upgrade your Intralink 3.x licenses to PDM Link heavy user licenses Your Intralink licences can be used for "light users" (ie those not using it with a CAD application). Light users can also only use Product View Light, heavy users can use Product View Standard edition.


All this said, its true that its all based on an honour system so you could in theory "throw the doors open" and let anyone use it but PTC have the legal right to enter your premisses at any time or log into your server and interrogate the Aphelion server logs which record the the number of users logged on etc so "do you feel lucky punk?" (to quote a famous movie star). My PTC contact said that if you go over the limit occasionally they would tun a blind eye but anyone abusing the trust would get hammered which is fair enough really.

 

[khkh]

Light users can also only use Product View Light, heavy users can use Product View Standard edition.

Is this for real? Do you have a link to some documentation? I thougt that only PVLE was for free and that PVSE was $$$ no matter if you had a light or heavy license.

Regards
Kim

 

[kdmgooner]

Sorry I forgot to mention that we also have 10 PV licenses from the days of the PV graphics server. If these were purchased before a certain date you can also trade these in for PVSE licenses.