Projects

To track license usage by project and allocate licensing costs accurately, use projects. Each user works under an active project, and OpenLM Platform attributes their license usage to it. Users can choose the active project in the Workstation Agent or Personal Dashboard. The active project can also be set automatically from a system environment variable, or fall back to the user's default project.

The following screenshot shows the Projects list:

The Projects list with project names, dates, source, and priority.

Before you begin

Confirm these prerequisites:

• Projects product: Activate Projects in OpenLM Products. Projects doesn't work until you activate the product.
• Workstation Agent: Install the Workstation Agent on all target machines so it can capture which project is active during license usage.
• Directory Sync (optional): Use Directory Sync to create projects automatically from Active Directory organizational units.

To open Projects, select Navigation (the grid icon in the OpenLM Platform header), then Users, then Projects.

For related tasks, see Users and Groups, Directory Sync, and Agents Hub.

Projects and Settings

To manage projects, open Projects in the side navigation. To control how the Workstation Agent presents projects to users, open Settings (see Configure agent behavior).

Adding, editing, importing, and changing settings require an administrator role. Users without it see these pages in read-only mode. Everyone can export the project list to CSV.

Configure agent behavior

To control how the Workstation Agent and Personal Dashboard handle projects, open Settings. All controls sit under one Agent's behavior section. Select one of two mutually exclusive modes: Use OpenLM's projects or Support environment variable. Select Save to apply your changes.

The following screenshot shows the Agent's behavior options:

The Agent's behavior options on the Projects Settings page.

Use OpenLM's projects

To let users pick from projects managed here in OpenLM Platform, use the default mode. Selecting it turns on the following options (all on by default):

• Display active project at license retrieval: Prompt the user to confirm or select a project when an application retrieves a license.
• Display active project periodically: Prompt the user to confirm the active project at a set interval.
  • Display periodically every … minutes: Set the interval, in minutes, between periodic prompts. Must be greater than 0.
• Show "Set Active Project" in Personal Dashboard's projects page: Let users set their active project from the Personal Dashboard.
• Show "Create New Project" in Personal Dashboard's projects page: Let users create a new project directly from the Personal Dashboard.
• Show unassigned projects: Show all projects in the picker, including those not assigned to the user. This option is available only when Show "Set Active Project" in Personal Dashboard's projects page is on.

Support environment variable

To derive the active project from a system environment variable set on the workstation, instead of the OpenLM Platform project list, use this mode. Selecting it turns on these options:

• Environment variable name: Enter the name of the environment variable the agent reads to determine the project (for example, LM_PROJECT). Required in this mode.
• Add unknown projects: Automatically create a project when the environment variable reports a name that doesn't already exist in OpenLM Platform. Off by default.

Manage projects

To work with projects, open Projects. It lists every project for the tenant. You can:

• Add, edit, and delete projects, and use Enable and Disable to change their state.
• Switch between a flat grid and a hierarchical tree view.
• Search, filter columns, filter by date range, and show or hide inactive projects.
• Import projects from a CSV file or export the list to CSV.

The default grid columns are Project Name, Start Date, End Date, Created By, and Priority. To show additional columns, use the column menu (⋮): Parent Project, Allocate Time, Percent Done, and Status (Enabled/Disabled). Created By shows the project's source: Admin (created in this app), Agent (created from a workstation), CSV (imported), or LDAP (created by Directory Sync).

Grid and tree views

To change how projects are displayed, use the View By switch:

• Grid view: a flat, sortable table with column filters and date-range filters. Use it to scan project details.
• Tree view: the parent/child hierarchy, with expandable branches. Use it to see how projects nest.

The following screenshot shows the tree view:

The tree view, with parent and child projects.

Search, filter, and date ranges

To find projects, use the following controls:

• Search matches across project fields and assigned usernames (up to 100 characters).
• Toggle Filters turns on per-column filters in grid view, for example filter Priority by Low, Medium, or High, or Created By by source.
• Start Date Range and End Date Range filter the list to projects whose start or end dates fall in the range (grid view only).
• Show disabled includes disabled projects in the list. Otherwise they are hidden, and an icon marks them when shown.

Add or edit a project

Select Add Project (or the edit icon on a row) to open the project form, which has three tabs: Project, Users, and Groups.

The following screenshot shows the project form:

The Add Project form with the project detail fields.

On the Project tab:

• Active / Inactive: Whether the project is active. An inactive project is hidden from the picker.
• Name: The project name. Required and unique per tenant (case-insensitive).
• Parent Project: Optional. Nest this project under another to build a hierarchy. A project cannot be its own parent, and parent/child loops are rejected.
• Priority: Low, Medium, or High. Defaults to Low.
• Allocated Time: Planned hours for the project (informational).
• Progress: Percent complete, 0–100 (informational).
• Start Date / Start Time and End Date / End Time: The project window. The start must be earlier than the end.

Only the project name and parent are used to attribute and organize usage. Priority, allocated time, and progress are descriptive attributes for tracking and reporting. Select Save to create or update the project.

Note

Start and end dates define the project window, but a project stays available until you disable it. Enabling or disabling is the only lifecycle control the service enforces.

Enable, disable, and delete

Select one or more projects with the row check boxes, then use the toolbar:

• Disable deactivates the selected projects. Disabling a parent also disables all of its child projects, and a child cannot be enabled while its parent is disabled.
• Enable reactivates disabled projects.
• Delete removes the selected projects. Deleting a project doesn't delete its children: they are kept and moved up to the top level. The project is also removed from all users and groups it was assigned to.

Disable and Delete ask for confirmation before they run.

Import and export CSV

Use Import records to create projects in bulk from a CSV file (administrators only), and Export CSV to download the current list.

The following screenshot shows the import dialog:

The Import CSV dialog on the Projects list.

The CSV columns match the export template: Project Name, Start Date, End Date, Created By, Priority, Parent Project, Allocate Time, Percent Done, and Status. On import:

• Parent Project is matched by parent name: the parent must already exist or appear earlier in the file.
• Created By is ignored. Imported projects always get the source CSV.
• Missing values default to Allocate Time 0, Percent Done 0, and Priority Medium. Status accepts Enabled or Disabled.
• Write dates in your account's date format.

After import, the dialog reports how many records succeeded and failed. If any rows fail, you can download only the failed rows, fix them, and re-upload.

Assign users to a project

On the Users tab of a project, assign the users who should see it in their Personal Dashboard.

The following screenshot shows the Users tab:

The Users tab of a project, listing assigned users.

The tab has the following controls:

• Add Users To Project: Pick users to assign. Users come from Users and Groups. Confirm that at least one user exists there.
• Set As Default Project / Remove default project: Mark this project as the selected user's default. Each user has at most one default project. It is the fallback used when the agent doesn't report an explicit project. A default is marked with a home icon in the Username column.
• Remove: Unassign the selected users.
• Show disabled: Include deactivated users in the list.

The grid shows Username, First Name, Last Name, Display Name, Email, and Department. Select Save to save assignment changes.

Assign groups to a project

The Groups tab works the same way for groups, with Add Groups To Project, Set As Default Project / Remove default project, Remove, and Show disabled. Groups also come from Users and Groups. The grid shows the Group name and a Members count. Select the count to view the group's members in a read-only list.

Choose the active project

The active project depends on your Settings and the user:

• Explicit selection: with Use OpenLM's projects, the agent prompts the user at license retrieval, periodically, or both, and the user can set or create a project from the Personal Dashboard (when those options are turned on).
• Environment variable: with Support environment variable, the agent reads the configured variable and uses that project (optionally creating it when Add unknown projects is on).
• Default project: if no project is reported explicitly, usage falls back to the user's default project.

Users can also work with projects from the Projects page of Personal Dashboard when the corresponding Settings options are turned on. For more information, see Personal Dashboard administration.

Automate project creation with Directory Sync

Directory Sync can create and maintain projects from your Active Directory structure. Projects it creates appear with the source LDAP. Beyond creation, Directory Sync can also update a project's parent and add or remove users on existing projects, keeping the project structure aligned with your directory.

Project visibility and Agents Hub

The Settings of Projects control which project-selection options users see, for example whether the agent prompts at license retrieval, and whether Personal Dashboard shows the Set Active Project and Create New Project actions. See Configure agent behavior.

Agents Hub is where you govern Personal Dashboard more broadly: its page policies and whether project selection is forced. Use the two together: Projects Settings for what the project picker offers, and Agents Hub for the surrounding Personal Dashboard policy.

See project usage in reports

Project usage data appears in BI Reports. The Projects Dashboard (under Reporting) embeds the User and Project Insights analytics dashboard, and the same data feeds the Project report and Project usage BI reports.