How Flexible Licenses Work

Flexible and standard licenses are differentiated by a “minimum check-out time” setting. Note that flexible licenses are NOT returned and made available to other users as soon as a user logs out. Nor are standard licenses tied forever to a particular user name.

Instead, standard licenses have a relatively long minimum check-out period and flexible licenses have a relatively short one. At this time, standard licenses have a seven-day check-out period, while flexible licenses have a 24-hour check-out period.

This means that a user who is granted a standard license is guaranteed access to that license for a full week. Even if that user logs out and doesn’t log back in for two days, that license will not be granted to anybody else.

However, a flexible license is guaranteed to its user for a much shorter period — in this example, a single 24-hour day. If that user needs it at 9:00 AM and is finished with it by 11:00 AM, the license will not become available to another user until 9:00 AM the next morning. On the other hand, it will be returned and made available to another user after only a single day— much sooner than the week it takes for a standard license to become available to other users.

Note that the minimum check-out time does not mean that the license will suddenly return to the available license pool at the end of that period. If you are still actively using the license when the minimum check-out time is reached, your license will be automatically renewed as long as you do not exceed a minimal idle time setting. The minimal idle time is set to 60 minutes by default. During this period, AccuRev sends a “heartbeat” to the license manager every thirty minutes if the user is still active. (User administrators can extend the 60 minute period with RLM administration functions, though they cannot shorten it.) Once the user has been inactive for 60 minutes, the license is checked in and made available to somebody else.

The key concept to note here is: A license key, whether standard or flexible, will not time-out and be made available to different user as long as the original user is actively working with AccuRev.

The figure below illustrates how these time-outs affect an AccuRev license. In this example, the times are representative of a flexible license. A standard license would be similar, except the minimum check-out time would be seven days.

In addition to these license manager settings, licenses are affected by the following actions:

•	log outs -- When the user logs out of AccuRev, the license is checked in. However, if the log out occurs within the minimum check out time, the same license will be returned if that user logs in again.

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session time outs -- If the AccuRev session times out, the license is checked in. If and when the user logs in to renew the session, a license is checked out again. This may be a new license, or the original license, depending on the minimum check out time. In any case, no more than one license is checked out to renew the session.

•	multiple computers -- If a user logs in from different physical computers or clients during the course of the day, the license manager keeps track of this and will not use more than one license to accommodate these multiple log ins.