We received many requests to explain the "communicating" and "non-communicating" workstations tab - so here it is:

An OpenLM Agent could be installed on end users workstations in order to allow the system to close software and release floating licenses back to the license pool when a user is inactive. So far, OpenLM Agent is installed mostly with OpenLM for ESRI ArcGIS software, since we support the TIMEOUT feature for this software.

Workstations tab in EasyAdmin was designed in order to allow an easy management of Agent installations. EasyAdmin lists the "communicating" and " non-communicating" workstations in two separate lists.

The principle is that a "workstation", as defined for OpenLM, is a workstation that used floating license that is monitored by OpenLM Server, at least once. If a workstation has never accessed any floating license and OpenLM Agent is not installed on it, then OpenLM software will not be aware of it, and it will not be listed in any of the lists.

A communicating workstation is a workstation that has an Agent and it is constantly sending out "AgentAlive" messages to OpenLM Server.

A "non-communicating" workstation is a workstation that accesses floating licenses (which are monitored by OpenLM Server) but does not send out the "AgentAlive" message to the OpenLM Server. When a workstation with an installed Agent that regularly communicates with the server misses several sequential "AgentAlive" requests, it will be also listed in the "non-communicating" list. In the current version 1.5.0, the listing of that workstation is kept in the "communicating" workstations list, but it will be changed in the next version (1.5.1) due to the confusion it is creating. In version 1.5.1, once the workstation stops communicating it will only be listed only in the "non-communicating" list.

How can the system administrator use the workstations tab?

There are many possible examples, here are a few:

• Management of the Agent software distribution: During Agent distribution proses, it is very helpful to track progress using the information displayed in this tab. The distribution process ends when the "non- communicating" list of workstations is empty.
• After distributing OpenLM Agent to all workstations, the system manager can see if any of the Agents has a software problem, wrong settings or if it was deliberately stopped for any reason.
• A great tool to locate unauthorized access to the licenses: In version 1.5.1 the list will include the workstation name, time and the last user that worked on the workstation.