Working from Home with Floating Licences

[AliBeadle]

Hi,
We are looking at helping staff possibly needing to work from home over the next few weeks. We use floating licences on the company network. I note that a laptop user on the network can take out a licence and the server can be configured so that it does not release it when they disconnect - allowing them to continue working at home later.

But is there a solution for someone who wants to 'check out' a licence and then use it on a home PC that is not connected to our company network?

Options I have thought of, but looking for alternatives:

• Get the home users to setup their own local keystore server and transfer a licence to them temporarily (disabling it on the network version for that period0: a bit complicated and possibly not something all user's will want to do with their own home PCs,
• Setup a VPN so that home users can access the company networked licence server: almost certainly too much for our IT department to setup in time
• Get the home user to register for the 30 day trial licence: Hope the situation does not last that long. Also suspect legality given the licence clause "it is licensed to you for evaluation purposes only"?

[Geert Bellekens]

You can also try to setup an RDP server, or Citrix with Enterprise Architect.
That way the users could still use the same EA repository and license server.

Geert

[Glassboy]

We use direct access from windows 10 to hook into the corporate network and access the licence server.

Does that work now?  Last time I tried that there were IP6 issues.

[Eve]

The old keystore service doesn't support IPv6, and is also non-encrypted which makes it less than ideal for working from home if there's no VPN.

The easiest solution to set-up would be a trial version of PCS, which has the added bonus of allowing users to browse the model using their web browser.

[Glassboy]

The old keystore service doesn't support IPv6, and is also non-encrypted which makes it less than ideal for working from home if there's no VPN.

The easiest solution to set-up would be a trial version of PCS, which has the added bonus of allowing users to browse the model using their web browser.

or if you actually have enough licences create one file based keystore per machine.

[Eve]

By PCS Functionality are you referring specifically to WebEA and/or Prolaborate?

Yes, they are targeted at different groups. WebEA does not provide a full modeling environment. It is most suited to users browsing the model or perhaps documenting some information while off-site before integrating that with the model in full when they get back to a desktop environment.

[Dah Sra]

The easiest solution to set-up would be a trial version of PCS, which has the added bonus of allowing users to browse the model using their web browser.

Hi AliBeadle

Additional info to Eve post, With PCS support you can have a ready to use cloud-hosted repositories for your EA Environment.
Please refer https://community.sparxsystems.com/news/1315-aws-cloud-sparxea



Arshad

[skiwi]

We use direct access from windows 10 to hook into the corporate network and access the licence server.

What did you do to get direct access to handle the IPV4 messaging to the licence server? (Since DA is IPV6 and the licence server isn't)

[Uffe]

Hi everyone,


Returning to the OP, if it's still an issue.

• Get the home users to setup their own local keystore server and transfer a licence to them temporarily (disabling it on the network version for that period0: a bit complicated and possibly not something all user's will want to do with their own home PCs,

You don't actually need to set up a local keystore for this deployment case. You can install licenses directly in the client without either a shared keystore file or a keystore server. This is the "Private Key" section of the license management GUI. The user only needs to install the EA client, not any keystore.

So you could remove a number of license keys from the keystore, e-mail one to each user and tell them to add it manually. EA does not distinguish "private" keys from "shared" (keystore) keys, each key can be used in either scenario.

If you do this, you may find you don't have enough keys for everyone -- that's the point of floating licenses, after all. So you may need to do some prioritizing.


On a separate note,

We use direct access from windows 10 to hook into the corporate network and access the licence server.

What did you do to get direct access to handle the IPV4 messaging to the licence server? (Since DA is IPV6 and the licence server isn't)

Presumably they serve licenses from the cloud server (aka "Floating License Server"), which supports IPv6. It's only the old keystore-only license server (aka "Keystore Service") that doesn't.


For anyone else struggling with this issue, another alternative is to go to a file based keystore for the duration. This still requires the clients to have access to the corporate network, but (assuming that this entails having access to corporate file shares) does not require a separate port to be opened in the corporate firewall. So depending on how your remote access is set up this might be a solution.

HTH,


/Uffe