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Tech Support Blog: Using the SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal

Monday June 11, 2018 at 3:54pm

NOTICE: Online Licensing has been discontinued by SOLIDWORKS


If you read the first blog in this series you should now understand what is possible in the Admin Portal and how to access. Hopefully by now you have set things up so you have designated your Admin and have access to the site.

If you read the first blog in this series you should now understand what is possible in the Admin Portal and how to access. Hopefully by now you have set things up so you have designated your Admin and have access to the site.

Below is the first screen you shall see when logging in as the Admin user. From here you can see all the users that are associated with any of the company’s SOLIDWORKS assets. Your first task is to clean up this data as there may be some historical information about employees no longer with the company. You can search (via the left hand side) and click into any user using their first name which is a hyperlink. You can also manually read through the list of users with the |<  <  >  >| icons.

If you need to remove a member, click into them and the option to Remove Member is in the upper right corner. Notice the “?” tooltip- it will state that a member cannot be removed until all products are removed from them. This can be done via the “Remove Product” link in red text further down the page.

Inviting Members & Admins

If you click back to the Members section (by clicking the link in the blue header bar) you can begin to invite any new members that are not featured in your employee list. These would be active SOLIDWORKS users, or staff that may need to have an overview of usage (i.e. IT or CAD Admins).

This process is pretty self-explanatory, allowing you to invite many people at once, define whether they are just software users (Members) or Admins and altering the text in the email you send.

Admin - you can have as many Admin users as you wish- by granting this access the additional admin users can use the Admin Portal to do all that is discussed in this blog series.

Members - this is simply stating that said user is part of your organisation and uses SOLIDWORKS. These individuals can then be associated with SOLIDWORKS serial keys and also have their software changed to the online licensing method. It can also help automate the installations of SOLIDWORKS as their serial key information can be pre-set from the Admin Portal.

Here is a sample of what the email looks like when a colleague is invited in:

Whilst a link is given to validate the existence of a SOLIDWORKS account for the invited user (called a SOLIDWORKS ID), their login won’t give access to the Admin Portal itself and instead show a page similar to the below advising who their Admin users are.

Assigning Products (SOLIDWORKS Licenses)

We as a reseller have access to systems that tell us what PC a SOLIDWORKS license is active on, but unless the users’ email was used during registration, there is nothing in our system to ascertain which person uses this computer. The SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal will allow you to assign these licenses to the users if you wish. Note this is optional- if a SOLIDWORKS license is not assigned to a user it can still be used by an employee, and can be transferred to colleagues using the traditional methods. For Online License allocation (which we discussed in Blog 3 of this series) you must assign the product to the intended end user - this is a mandatory prerequisite.

So to start, you need to find the user. Do this via the search filters on the left hand side of the Members page. Type their first or surname (use wildcards if you need to) and press enter to run the search. The first name of the listed results acts as a hyperlink where you can delve deeper into this user’s information.

So below I have a staff member called “My User”- this is a new user I have invited in so they have no assigned products currently. Further down are the “Available Products”- these are all the SOLIDWORKS licenses associated with your company since they first invested in SOLIDWORKS. This therefore may show older expired products as well as some of the add-ons that come with SOLIDWORKS such as CAM, PDM Standard and Visualize. Because of this you may have a lot of serial key information to trawl through if you have a lot of software, so the gear icon should be used to create custom searches/queries.

I know that “My User” already has SOLIDWORKS installed, so have checked their install under Help > About SOLIDWORKS to see their serial key in use. I can then use this in the query.

I use a “New Query” from the gear icon (ALT + Q shortcut) and then can click into any of the columns to act as text boxes to type in the value I wish to search for. Wildcards (*) are accepted here too. You can also sort columns in numerical or alphabetical order, and using the “gear” icon again can change the display of columns visible to you (Ctrl + Shift + K). Once you have typed in your query, press return/enter on the keyboard to run it. Note the “Export” option at the bottom of the list - you can export any of the search/query results, as well as the entire set of data to view in programs such as excel.

I have found the serial key I wish to assign so have the row highlighted and can click “Assign Product”. Note once your query has returned results you can see at a glance with the column statuses (Y or N) whether the asset has already been assigned elsewhere, or is an “Online License” enabled product. You can click into the asset as the product name is a hyperlink and this can give information such as the active PC currently using this license.

Products Section

As above you can see information about a Product (SOLIDWORKS license) after running a query when assigning products to named users. You can also use the Products tab and run similar queries. The filters on the left hand side are your friend here, so use them wisely, as well as quick searches for product name or serial key if you prefer not to use a full query.

Once you have found the Product you would like more information on, you can click the product name which is a hyperlink.

So these are my serial keys- blanked out for obvious reasons, showing my product types, activation status and subscription/maintenance expiry dates. As a side note at this point, if your license key has a zero as the 3rd digit, this is a “Standalone” license and therefore can be used as a SOLIDWORKS Online License (more information on a future blog), if the 3rd digit is a one (like the PDM Standard one below) then it is a floating Network License and not available for online licensing.

I have clicked into my SOLIDWORKS Premium 2018 license for further review.

You can see that it shows this license is using the traditional “Machine Activation”, is active on my computer (and shows the name of this) and has myself as an Assigned Member. There are also some “Add-on” products with my SOLIDWORKS key to give me access to more modules. You may or may not see these depending on what you have purchased. There is also a section for “Assigned External Members”. If any of these are listed it can prevent you from doing certain things like changing to an Online License. These External members are legacy details which have related to the license key in the past. They may no longer be active employees, so if you see these you cannot remove them yourself, and will need to contact us so we can have SOLIDWORKS remove this user from your account. As a reseller we have no direct access to your Admin Portal unless you share your login details with us.

Services and CAD Admin Dashboard

“Services” work almost identically to the Product tab, where you can search for and drill into additional non-software purchases you have made through SOLIDWORKS. These will be few and far between for most customers and includes things like eLearning Training subscriptions and also the MySolidWorks Professional subscription for additional web-based content.

The CAD Admin Dashboard has been around for a few years and has been added to the Admin Portal for easy access. As this is beyond the scope of this blog, see the SOLIDWORKSHelp documentation for more information.

So this is the end of our 2nd blog covering the ins and outs of the Admin Portal. To reiterate, to get this far you do not need to have an active subscription contract for any of your SOLIDWORKS licenses, as the Admin Portal will show all legacy purchases too. In the Admin Portal you should now be able to…

  • Clean out any ex-employee data associated with your account.
  • Invite new members or admins that are actively involved with your company’s use of SOLIDWORKS.
  • Export the member or product information to allow review in products such as Excel.
  • Assign SOLIDWORKS licenses to individual users which can help automate the installation process of SOLIDWORKS in the future.
  • Find serial keys for add-on products issued as part of the subscription process (e.g. SOLIDWORKS Visualize).
  • Check the activation status of any serial key and what PC it is associated with. 

This last point is arguably one of the biggest benefits to customers as we take a huge volume of calls on our help desk from customers who simply don’t know where their licenses are being held.

Up next is our introduction to SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing. To use Online Licensing you need a good overview of the Admin Portal, so these first two blogs are a necessary read. Below is a link to the first introduction blog if you need a recap.

By Adam Hartles

Group Technical Manager

PREVIOUS BLOG <<<<<< 01 Introducing the SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal and SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing

NEXT BLOG >>>>>> 03 Using SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing

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