FELCO Solutions, Inc

PTC Licensing

Licensing Configurations

There are several flavors of Pro/ENGINEER such as Student Edition, Educational, Commercial and Evaluation licenses. These are mostly controlled by licensing and compatability between them is limited. All the rules for passing files between flavors of Pro/ENGINEER can be found in a PTC Technical Support Knowledge Database document.

Commercial Licensing

Commercial Pro/ENGINEER is what everyone refers to as Pro/ENGINEER and is purchased directly from PTC or through resellers. For further assistance in obtaining commercial Pro/ENGINEER licensing please contact a FELCO Solutions, Inc. representative.

Educational Licensing

Educational Pro/ENGINEER is purchased by schools at a greatly reduced price. These bulk purchases are directly negotiated through the Educational Sales department of PTC. The available programs and contact information can be found on PTC's web site here.

Files created using Educational software can be opened in Commercial Pro/ENGINEER using this process. More information can be found in the PTC Technical Support Knowledge Database by searching for "educational".

Student Edition Licensing

Student Edition is a uniquely licensed flavor of Pro/ENGINEER. It requires the CD to be in the drive. Also, it cannot use floating option modules and does not write out a trail file. Additionally, it is restricted to only being able to retrieve files created in Student Edition or Educational Pro/ENGINEER. Files created in Student Edition cannot be opened in Commercial Pro/ENGINEER. The splash screen and window banner are also modified to indicate "for educational use only".

Some PTC courses provide Pro/ENGINEER Student Edition CDs. Instructions for installing Student Edition at home can be found here

Evaluation Licensing

Evaluation licenses are free, time limited, commercial licenses. They are also known as "Try before you buy" licenses.

Most evaluation licenses are for 15 days. When you request an evaluation license for a customer the clock starts ticking the second the request has been processes. Time spent getting codes and software is time taken away from the evaluation. So you have to get things installed and running immediately with evaluation licenses. Files generated using evaluation licenses can be utilized in Commercial Pro/ENGINEER.

Additional Licensing Questions

Most questions about licensing today are about License Simplification and License Borrowing. If you have other licensing questions, please refer to the FLEXlm manual located in (FLEXlm Loadpoint)\html\usascii\proe\helpSysTop\siteset or log a call with PTC Technical Support.

License Simplification

License simplification was introduced in Pro/ENGINEER 2001. What is license simplification? In essence it is a new way of licensing PTC products to reduce the number of calls to PTC License Management. Most of us would agree this is a good thing. However, most companies have not implemented license simplification yet. More answers can be found here.

Wildfire 2.0 must use Simplified Licenses. This adds the step of having to simplify the licenses in addition to requesting Wildfire 2.0 license codes. It has to be done once and can be done from here.

More information can be found in the PTC Technical Support Knowledge Database by searching for "license simplification".

License Borrowing

License Borrowing allows users with portable computers to check out a license and take it with them for up to 5 days. This eases the administrative overhead by consolidating licenses to a single server.

Questions about installing license borrowing are answered in a Knowledge Database document. There are a couple of drawbacks to using license borrowing.

Borrowed licenses cannot be returned early.

License Borrowing only works with Wildfire 2.0 and later. It doesn't support any earlier releases of Pro/ENGINEER.

More information can be found in the PTC Technical Support Knowledge Database by searching for "license borrow".