Hey all,
I wanted to clarify licensing and session timeouts with regard to various versions of DocuWare in order to understand how stuck I am with our current version (6.11).
Background: We have 20 concurrent license, and so far that has been plenty -- we rarely are using more than 10 at any given time). This is because in 6.11, sessions timeout after roughly 12 minutes of idle time, whether those sessions are in a web clint or Platform SDK service connections. The timeouts are also useful because forcing a logoff (Platform SDK scenario) does not actually kill the connection immediately. The connection remains for an additional two minutes, and everything I have heard from DocuWare support indicates this cannot be changed.
Correct me where I am wrong about the additional points I am about to make:
If we move to 6.12, it looks like connections will no longer automatically timeout. Any scan station or occasional user who checks DocuWare in the morning and leaves their browser up all day will be burning a license all day. We'll be out of licenses by noon, most days. From what I have read, there is also no way of forcing a logoff in 6.12 via an administrative tool, so ven if we can see who is logged on, there is no way to kill that license use without contacting the user and telling them to log off.
Any Platform SDK connection will also burn a license, I assume, unless a logoff is issued. This is problematic. I do not currently log-off a Platform SDK connection after each operation because then I cannot make modular code. That is, if I connect, perform an operation (say, indexing a document), and logoff, I will burn though all 20 license in a matter of seconds if I do any sort of batch process that performs the operation many times. This is because of that two-minute "grace period" on disconnections. If I do more than 20 operations in 120 seconds (which is obviously very possible), all licenses are used up.
That's why I create a global service connection instance and then let it timeout when it goes idle, and that scheme has been working fine for over a year now. NOTE: On .NET this is not as much of an issue because a .NET application appears to know how to use an existing ServiceConnection instance and not burn through a license every time, even with disconnects in between. At least, that is how I recall it working before. But we are not using .NET for the bulk of our Platform SDK connections -- we just use an XMLHTTP object, automated via Visual Foxpro. In 6.12, these connections would burn a license every time they are initiated, and they would not logoff until 120 seconds after an explicit LogOff resource is accessed.
I am thinking I am between a rock and a hard place. If I move to 6.12 we will be forced to get more licenses, and those will be named. Either that or I will need to figure out a way to disconnect Platform SDK connections and still allow for modular, batch programming, something I cannot see how to do right now. Or, we just stay on 6.11 where everything works the way we want, but we eventually fall off of DocuWare support for being too old.
Am I missing something here, or is my assessment basically correct? Anyone else out there dealing with these sorts of dilemmas?
Thanks,
Joe Kaufman
