Automating the use of LM_PROJECT on the client side
Are there any documented recommendations for using LM_PROJECT on the client side? The primary use case for my question is a customer who has multiple projects that their employees need to bill hours toward and wants to track the usage of the engineering apps towards these projects. They don't want their users to have to manually set environment variables every time. Are there some batch files/scripts available for public consumption to automate?
Also, for Windows systems, is the environment variable preferable to the registry entry (I would assume in this case, yes) and can someone provide me the format of the registry entry for LM_PROJECT? I know it goes in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FLEXlm License Manager, but wanted to verify you would simply add a String value called LM_PROJECT to that registry key and populate with the project name (and any other caveats like no special characters).
Bill Ferring Principal Consultant: Flexera One - FNMS - FNMforSAP - FNMEA - SVM/SVR - SaaS Manager
Since the LM_PROJECT environment variable is only read when a client application starts-up, one could implement a simple .bat file (on Windows) to set the variable and then launch the application.
set LM_PROJECT=Project1
MyApplicationName.exe
If you create a New System Environment variable, that could be the default LM_PROJECT and the client (using a bat file for example) could reset it to a new setting.
Hi Gary, this is a great approach if the customer has a small number of desktops to update, and a limited number of Flex-enabled apps to monitor: it is simple and only requires the shortcuts to be updated. You need to trust the engineers also to not bypass the batch.
Thanks for sharing your success with a similar project. Good point about trusting the user not to bypass the bat files. If the application itself were to modify the project under the covers based on user input, that might mitigate that loop hole.
Great project. We have developed such a framework in Australia with FNMEA + a Flex-enabled Agent to detect usage of apps, show a popup to the engineer with a drop down, and record usage against a specific LM_PROJECT. Note that the engineer can work on multiple projects simultaneously, and that it is not limited to Flex enabled apps. This has worked for 5 years now, with more than 1000+ engineers, the company use it to recover the cost of software back to their customers. Feel free to contact me if you want more details, cheers
