The first license verification on logon is the general license check. The general license check does not aim on the price book-licenses that are used to work with Smart Materials. As the database contains a good portion of our business logic and Intergraph also considers the database design as an intellectual property, external connects are considered as a seat, too. Additionally, customers might create their own front-end applications to work against the Smart Materials database, and this kind of usage is also considered as a seat. External connections are not prohibited, but the general license check prevents working in Smart Materials if the allowed number of overall sessions in the ISL keystores are crossed.
With SBCS, the external connects are assigned to one payable module that has free seats (see License Module Assignment).
The charging of the commercial seats might happen during application logon when the general license check is executed. The general license check counts the external sessions and pulls a license. If the first module in the above list has no seats available, it proceeds with the next one. If none of the modules has seats available, the application exits, displaying the MAR-05005 message (see Error Messages).
With SPLM, when pulling a commercial seat, it was possible that its license might expire soon and an SPLM server warning was transmitted to the requester of the seat. This functionality is not available with ISL.
Theoretically, all commercial seats can be burned by third- party connections. This is similar to the old licensing concept, where the general license count can take up all allowed connections, so that the Smart Materials applications could not login anymore. The difference is, that the external seats now also appear in the license usage report of ISL. So, it will be a better visibility of the required number of seats for the customer.
Given the scenario that the general license check is passed successfully, after it pulled a commercial seat, and the module-specific license check thereupon requires a seat of the same license module, it does not surrender the seat and request the same again from the license pool. It continues using the same seat, with performance in mind.
For example, if you logon to classic and you were brought to the menu, it might have pulled a Site license, because this had a seat available in the license pool. If you open a Site screen now, it will keep the same seat from ISL. Also, if you close the site screen and you are back in the menu, it will keep it. If you open a procurement screen now, it typically would return the Site seat and try to get an MSCM seat for instance.