A typical NetSPEX installation consists of one copy of NetSPEX Central Server plus multiple copies of NetSPEX Designer, based on the maximum number of concurrent users. If the implementation involves multiple sites, then NetSPEX Mirror Server might also be installed on one or more remote servers.

The central server stores NetSPEX license files, keeps track of the total number of available licenses, and allocates licenses to optional mirror servers and deliverable workspaces (designed for subconsultants and off-line users who do not require standards editing capabilities). The central server license file includes a license count that determines the number of concurrent users that can access NetSPEX. NetSPEX Administrator includes a complete set of license administration tools.

To account for the ebb and flow of workloads at various regional offices, NetSPEX allows you to distribute licenses to where they are needed at any given time. This can be accomplished through NetSPEX Administrator. License allocation assures that licenses are always available to users who access a standard managed by NetSPEX in different locations. For example, if you have 100 total licenses, you could allocate 50 licenses to your central server, 30 to a mirror server, and 10 to deliverable workspaces. In this example, users who access the central server are guaranteed to have 50 licenses available, users who access the mirror server are guaranteed to have 30 licenses available, and deliverable workspaces would have 10.

NetSPEX also allows you to define license partitions – used to ensure that a certain number of licenses are available on a server to a particular group of users. For example, if you have 50 licenses allocated to a server and you wish to ensure that a minimum of 10 of those licenses are always available to your Architectural group, you could create an Architectural license partition and assign it a quantity of 10 licenses. You could then specify the IP addresses or machine names of user workstations that are authorized to access licenses from the Architectural license partition. You can define as many different license partitions as you like until you use up your total allocated license count for the server.