I know that some of you have posted questions on different aspects of the licensing of the next generation of Pro/INTRALINK. I'll try to use this space to clear up any confusion and perhaps generate some discussion if there are still questions.

First and foremost, for maintenance-paying Pro/INTRALINK customers, Pro/INTRALINK software is available to you for free. It doesn't matter if your Pro/INTRALINK license was purchased as a standalone or as part of some bundle. If you own it and pay maintenance on it, you are entitled to the software upgrade. Also, if you currently own and pay maintenance on Division ProductView, you are entitled to a free upgrade to ProductView and the embedded visualization in Pro/INTRALINK.

Single-site vs. Multi-site licenses
The next generation of Pro/INTRALINK is available in two different license configurations of Single-site or Multi-site. The differences between these two licensing configurations are price and functionality. At less than half the cost of the Multi-site version, the Single-site version will not support replication (note that we're talking content replication here - package replication is not a part of Pro/INTRALINK due to its enhanced WAN performance). If you plan to have remote users retrieve and/or create new objects in your Pro/INTRALINK instance, it would be money well-spent, from a performance standpoint to have the Multi-site configuration so that you can take advantage of remote copies of your large Pro/ENGINEER data to enhance upload, download, check-in, and check-out speed.

Oracle bundling
In January of 2004, PTC started selling Pro/INTRALINK licenses without the costs for the Oracle licenses embedded.. In essence, if your facility already uses Oracle and has a Full-Use license for Oracle Database (either Enterprise or Standard), you don't need to pay PTC for access to the Oracle database. If, instead, you're a site without local DBA expertise or access to an Oracle distributor, you might be more inclined to just buy (or continue maintenance on) the Oracle for Pro/INTRALINK Upgrade licenses from PTC. With maintenance, this will afford you support for all future versions of Pro/INTRALINK and the Oracle licenses it requires.

Concurrent licensing
Pro/INTRALINK is licensed on a concurrent user basis. Many customers find that the necessary number of concurrent users on Pro/INTRALINK corresponds to the number of concurrent users on Pro/ENGINEER. Indeed, working best practices for Data Management dictate that you always track your product designs within Pro/INTRALINK. This will afford you the ability of controlling even early iterations, working concurrently with other designers and of course easy renaming, but I digress. ;-)

You may also find at your site that you need more Pro/INTRALINK licenses than Pro/ENGINEER licenses if you incorporate non-Engineers in your review and approval cycles (this may be especially true if you plan to use ProductView visualization for annotations and markups of designs in collaborative design reviews).

If you have some further questions or special cases that I hadn't considered, please feel free to let me know on our discussion forums.

Until next time...
Joe Ferrante