Understand What's Changed with Windchill Licensing

When you upgrade your Windchill version to 11.1 or later, you move from paper-based licensing to technical management of licenses and compliance. Learn what’s changed.

Understand changes in license management

When you upgrade to Windchill 11.1 or later, the system will manage individual license access for each user. Instead of using paper licenses, you'll download license files with the number of entitlements you have purchased.

You will entitle your Windchill users by adding them to a user group with access to the features in a Windchill profile. Each profile enables the set of actions that the members of the user group can perform in Windchill. The specific licenses you have purchased determine the number of users allowed. 

There are licenses for two types of end users:

• Named user licenses: a dedicated license
• Active daily user licenses: a group of users sharing entitlements over a 24-hour calendar day, limited to the number of purchased licenses

Learn about the available license packages at the resource below. Contact your PTC sales representative for additional information, including specifics on the feature groups and capabilities.  

Once the new version of Windchill is installed, you can find the built-in License Management Utility under Site > Utilities. This utility tracks license usage, among other license management tasks.

By assessing your active and inactive users, you can optimize the efficiency and value from your Windchill investment. Based on the usage information, you can identify needs for redistributing, deleting, or adding users.

From Windchill 12.0.2.0 and onward, the collection of license usage data will be automatically enabled by default upon a fresh installation, update, or upgrade. The option to opt-out from sending license usage data will no longer be available during the install. Learn more about this update and how to request exemptions here (including Greater China exemptions).

Recommended resources

• Windchill Application Suite – License Packages

Understand compliance enforcement 

The Windchill system now manages license compliance in these ways. 

• Purchased, configured license entitlements provide users with Windchill access.
• If the system does not detect a valid license file or your subscription has expired, you are notified that Windchill will shut down in 6 hours unless you acquire and configure a license file.
• Users can access only profiles to which they are entitled. 
• You can add members to a named user group only to the level of available licenses. 
• When a group of active daily users reaches the daily limit, others cannot access Windchill. 

The information in this guide will help you ensure user access and compliance as you upgrade to Windchill.