Application Note 1022: Products and Packaged licenses in OpenLM

Scope

This Article deals with two adjacent subjects: Renaming licensed features as products, and gathering these features into licensed packages.

The OpenLM license monitoring tool is designed to extract license usage reports, and obtain license statistics. In order for these reports not to be confusing, the following points need to be considered:

• Many features are only named as serial or coded strings, which bear little or no meaning for the end user. Renaming features is required in order to enhance readability and improve the understanding of EasyAdmin license reports.

• Package or Suit licenses are, as their name implies, a set of features which are licensed together as a package. These kind of licenses should be dealt differently than individual licenses, in order to avoid confusion.

The Products/Packages window

The interface for handling Product names Packages in EasyAdmin is the “Products/Packages” window. Open this window:
Click the OpenLM ‘Start’ button, and select ‘Administration’. The ‘Administration’ window opens.

Click the “Products/Packages” icon. The “Products/Packages” window opens.

Product names

The “Products/Packages” window enables users to define a meaningful product name to be displayed alongside a feature name. For example, the feature “40300MAP_5_0F” corresponds to the product “Map R5” in the image above. In order to edit the product name, click the Product name column for the row of that feature. There the product name is editable. Click the Save icon to commit your changes. The Add and Delete buttons at the top right can be used to insert or remove feature/product name combinations.

The “Products/Packages” window provides an interface to OpenLM’s translation table between Feature Names and Product Names. If this translation table is well maintained then the data reported on the EasyAdmin screens will be more comprehensible.

Setting up a Package in EasyAdmin

Here is a frequently asked customer question:
“We subscribed our application as a design Suite / Package. Each suite license includes licenses to several products. OpenLM indicates that we have a lot more licenses than we actually have. Moreover: having drawn a certain number of licenses, OpenLM indicates a smaller percentage of license usage than expected.”
This kind of complaint directly indicates a misconfiguration of packaged licenses.

Important Note:

Prior to OpenLM Server version 1.7.1.9, deleting a populated package resulted in an error. Make sure not to mark a populated package for deletion prior to this version .

Autodesk case study

In order to organize licensed features in packages, use the “Products/Packages” window. In this example, we’ll study the case of the “Autodesk Design Product Suite Ultimate 2012” Package.

• In  the “Products/Packages” window, select the “Autodesk Design Product Suite Ultimate 2012” and check the “Is Package” checkbox.
• Click the “Save” button.
• Close and reopen the “Products/Packages” window. It is necessary to close and reopen the window after marking a product as a package.

• Add each product in the suit to the list:
  • Select an item in the list, or click “Add” to add the product if you can’t find it there.
  • Select “Autodesk Design Product Suite Ultimate 2012” as the “Parent Package”. In the example below, the product suit corresponds with feature # 85796PDSU_2012_0f.
  • Click the “Save” button.
  • Repeat this for each item in the Package.

Revision Table