The Solarity Group Blog

A colleague asked me a question today about determining the number of Client Access Licenses (CALs) that are in place within their Project Server environment.

“We are trying to determine the process for determining how many active CALs there are at the end of the year for our true up process against our enterprise agreement. Is there any built in view or report that shows active users? If so, how does it determine active users? We are just trying to determine best practice in this area...”

The answer is that, in Project Web Access (PWA), you can navigate to a page that shows the number of users. To connect to the page and determine your CALs, follow these steps:

1. Log on as a Project Server administrator and connect to your PWA instance.
2. In the Quick Launch pane, click on Server Settings.
3. In the Server Settings page, click on the About Project Server link.
4. This page will show you two values:
   • Number Of Active Project Server Users: this value is determined by the count of all named Work resources (it does not include Material, Cost, or Generic Work resources); if you have any Work resources that do not represent users (e.g., forklifts, backhoes, and other equipment), you should manually reduce your CAL count when reporting your CAL requirements.
   • Number Of Project Professional Users: this value is determined by all those Project Server users who are included in the following security groups (or any other user who has the Log On To Project Server From Project Professional permission set to Allow):
     • Administrators
     • Portfolio Managers
     • Project Managers
     • Resource Managers

For this reason, it’s important to ensure that you have only those accounts that truly need to either access Project Server through PWA, or who will use Project Professional. If you don’t you can end up spending unnecessary dollars, and goodness knows we don’t have many of those available these days!

I hope this helps to clarify the question. Please don’t hesitate to email me (bud <at> solarity.com) or comment below for any additional questions or clarification.