Solid Edge Licensing can get quite confusing, especially when you aren’t dealing with them too often or even at all, depending on your company’s IT department.  I wanted to use this opportunity to write a blog to clear this often-times very hazy subject. There are two main types of solid edge licensing schemes: node-locked and floating.

Node-locked seats are tied to one specific machine, referencing an “SE CID”, a custom code generated by Solid Edge using various hardware of the machine. Any hardware changes to the machine will cause a change to the SE CID, thus requiring a new license.

Floating licenses, on the other hand, are tied to a “server” machine which “hands out” the available licenses, if you will. This server can be an actual server, or any computer on the network, even the same machine that uses Solid Edge, called “clients”.  Any number of client machines can have Solid Edge installed, but only the number of floating licenses can be used simultaneously. So 10 people that sporadically use Solid Edge can have it installed on their machines, but if you only have purchased 3 floating seats, then only 3 of those 10 can use the program at any given time. Once one person closes Solid Edge, another user can open it. There are ways to restrict certain users or groups to certain Solid Edge packages, by the way. Also, floating licenses can be of two types: dongle method, or host-id. The dongle is a USB stick, like a flash drive, that can be moved around and goes into the server machine and simply acts as the “key” to unlock the licenses to be handed out. The host-id method is tied to the physical address of the server machine, so similar to the node-locked; any changes to the hardware will require a new license.

For both node-locked and floating schemes, each seat gets a few additional items: home, travel, and emergency licenses. Home licenses are generated for 6 months at a time, are renewable, and tied to the SE CID of the machine; these are meant for personal development with the program. Travel licenses are similar to home but can be generated for up to 30 days. Emergency licenses are good for 7 days, and there is a limit of 3 per 60 days. Sometime to note with these types of licenses is that you will get a watermark on your Draft sheets, since they are not your permanent license for production work.

To conclude, I want to mention a few more details regarding licenses. If your licenses are not currently on maintenance, you will have to pay a fee to have a new license generated. For add-on products such as the Piping Library, Simulation, XpresRoute, etc., you cannot combine licensing schemes.  If you have 5 node-locked seats of Solid Edge Classic, you can add-on Wiring Harness as node-locked seats.  Likewise if you have 5 floating seats of Solid Edge Foundation, you can add Simulation only as floating seats.  Lastly, you can manage all of this on your own with a Webkey account, if your IT department lets you, of course. All you need is your sold-to ID and the Webkey Access Code, both of which are on your license file.  If you don’t have the time, or desire, to manage your licenses, we are of course always here to gladly help.