General
OpenLM is able to record information about the usage of various licenses and allocate them to different company projects. This ability facilitates license allocation according to organizational projects, and can also serve as a mean to effectively charge-back license usage expenses and manage project billing.
This ability complements OpenLM’s license monitoring capabilities; integrating license usage optimization with Active directory synchronization, Project assignment, and monitoring a variety of license managers such as FlexLM (Flexnet), Sentinel HASP, Sentinel RMS, RLM, DSLS, IBM LUM and LM-X.
Scope
The Project license usage recording capability is available for OpenLM from version 1.6 onwards. This Application Note describes the feature as implemented in the 1.7 version.
Project usage reporting
The Project usage reporting is available on the EasyAdmin web interface. Click OpenLM Start → Resports → Project usage in order to see the report. Set the filtering options on the left-hand side of the screen, and click the ‘Apply’ button in order to run the usage query.
It is also possible to view the report in a chart format, or extract the information to a CSV file (green arrow icon at the bottom) and manipulate it on a spreadsheet software.
However, before having any information to report – it is necessary to set up the projects. Please follow the section below in order to do so.
Projects Settings
The OpenLM Server configuration tool’s ‘Projects’ tab defines the policy of the Project usage monitoring capability. Please note that Projects’ information logging requires the installation of the OpenLM Agent (Either Active Agent or Utilizer Agent) on the end-users’ workstations.
Log Projects Information
Check the Log projects information checkbox to start recording license usage information according to projects’ allocation.
Minimal Usage Duration for Project
This setting defines the shortest duration for logging purposes. Shorter periods would be merged together to form significant usage periods. For example, if the minimal duration is set to 5 minutes, and a user has opened the application for only 3 minutes, this usage period will not be accumulated to the current session, but rather merged with the following session.
Active Project window
These settings define what end-users see on their workstations if they work on more than one project for their organization. If users are only allocated to one project, OpenLM will log their license usage without the need to take any action when the software is started. If the users work on more than one project, then a dialog box will appear on their screen prompting them to select the current project. The timing and duration for the appearance of this dialog box is configured here:
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Display at license retrieval: The default option is to prompt the worker to select the project when retrieving a license. This is a very useful way to ensure accurate logging of the project information, therefore the recommended setting is to leave the checkbox turned on.
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Display periodically every: Users may start to work on one project, and then switch to a different one, without changing the Active Project setting. If this checkbox is ticked, the dialog box will pop up in a predefined time interval, according to the number of minutes set by the user.
Hide projects option from menu
Deny users the ability to determine the name of the project on which they’re working.
Support Environment Variable
The LM_PROJECT env. variable support is a backward-compatibility option, that supports this variable for registering projects. The variable is defined separately for each workstation, so there is no option of overriding its value between users.
The environment variable option is disabled by default. It is recommended to use the OpenLM supplied solution, unless backward support of the environment variable option is required.
The “Add unknown project” option presents an administrative filter for project names that are unknown to the OpenLM server:
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Checked: The unknown project will be set and added to the list of projects.
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Unchecked (default): The unknown project will not be set.
Project creation
In order to create a new project, open the EasyAdmin web application.
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Click the EasyAdmin ‘Start’ Button, and navigate to “Users & Permissions” → “Projects”. The “Project List” dialog box appears.
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Click the “Add project” icon, and type in a name for the new project, e.g. “Proj1”.
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Click the “Members” icon. the “Users in Proj1” appears.
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Click the green ‘Add’ icon to assign users to this new Proj1.
Selecting the active project
When logging of project information is enabled (see above), work hours need to be assigned to a specific project. When there is only one project – that project will automatically be assigned all the working hours. When there are more than one project – it is up to end users to report on what project they are currently working.
1. One option for the end user to set the Active project is to right-click the Agent icon, and select the “Set Active Project” option.
2. Another option for setting the Active project is by a pop-up window. The appearance of this pop-up is configurable by options in the OpenLM server configuration tool’s ‘Projects’ tab, elaborated above.
