We have several times been asked how to borrow a license from your network so you can work from home or on the road. There are also some times errors that happen if you do attempt and did not do it correctly. So we decided to put together some information on the correct way to borrow your license.
First you will need to open your License Manager, this can be accessed in a couple ways. One is from the Windows Start/SOLIDWORKS 20xx/SOLIDWORKS Tools/SolidNetwork License Manager. The other is from inside SOLIDWORKS the Help pull down a link to open the SolidNetwork License Manager…
Once this is open you will be on the License Usage tab, will need to select the License Borrow tab.
Here check to see that there are licenses available at the level you want to borrow. This can be confusing as it will show that there are 0 free of SOLIDWORKS Standard if all of your licenses are Pro or Premium. This is intended to show this as technically you do not own just Standard it comes with your Pro & Premium licenses.
Now if you had opened the license Manager from inside SOLIDWORKS close it as it can cause errors when trying to borrow.
And then what shows that you borrowed will look like this instead of that.
Now that SOLIDWORKS is closed and we see we have a license that we want available we can borrow it. First let’s select when we would like to borrow it until.
Then select the product, now I selected Premium as this is what our licenses all are but if I want I can select Standard.
Once I select the Borrow I get presented with this window that allows to select the lower license of Standard from the pull down.
If you leave this as it came up it will borrow a Premium & a Standard seat of SOLIDWORKS. Now that we have the license borrowed we can disconnect from the network and the license will be available to use. We do want to remember how we were connected to the network when the license was borrowed as we will need to reconnect the same way when we return if we need to return it.
Now when we do get back into the office and still have the license borrowed we can return it after reconnecting into the network. Once again be sure this connection is identical to how you were connected when you borrowed. If you were wireless connect wirelessly, or even if it was a docking station reconnect to that. If you returned after the borrowed until date the license should have returned automatically at midnight on that date for both your computer and the server.
Now we will need to access the License Manager again I do recommend from the Windows Start this time. Select the License Borrow tab and select the licenses to be returned and hit the Return button.
The licenses should return without error and you see this.
Now if you do run into errors or issues on either end of this give us a call.
