Understanding license usage

Server Pro licensing is quite different from other cloud-based solutions in that there is no concept of free collaboration, any user who logs in and accesses a project is considered an active user by the system, necessitating a corresponding license.

The standard Server Pro license allows you to run the application in a production environment as well as one in a non-production/sandbox environment; it is highly recommended that you provision a non-production environment for testing.

The active/inactive flag for an account is just a high-level indicator for administrators to help indicate usage. If a user who holds a Server Pro license leaves your organization, there is no immediate requirement to delete their account and their associated projects. This action is often required for regulatory and compliance purposes, but from a licensing point of view, the license allocated to the departing user can be reassigned to their successor, allowing for a seamless transition.

Administrators can view the total number of active users on your instance via Admin > Manage Users > License Usage. An active user is defined as someone who has opened a project on your Server Pro instance in the last 12 months.

In general, it's advisable not to delete accounts (unless they are no longer required), as this action would lead to the removal of the account's projects and prevent any collaborators from accessing them.

Presently, there is no provision for deactivating accounts; they either exist with retained data or don't exist at all. The recommended approach is to leave the account and its associated data within Server Pro, ensuring any projects are part of your backup process.

Over time, unused accounts will transition to an inactive state (as they will not have accessed a project within the past 12 months), denoting that they no longer require a license, even though the accounts and associated projects are retained. In the event a user returns, they can access their account and projects, reinstating their status as an active user and once again requiring a licence.

It's important to highlight that in Server Pro, Administrators retain the capability to access the projects of any user, even after that user has left the organization. This maintains a certain degree of access and authority over projects. Additionally, Administrators hold the ability to transfer ownership of projects from one user to another, offering full control over your data.

As Server Pro is architected to work offline, we have purposely chosen not to enforce a strict user limit, and there are no restrictions that would prevent new users from being onboarded in cases where deployments are over their seat limit. This helps ensure that users can access their projects when needed and are not hindered by a temporary lack of seats.

In cases where you go over your seat limit, we would request that you reach out to the Success team ([e-mail]) to let us know at your earliest convenience. The Success team can then provide you with prorated pricing for adding more seats, either midterm or aligned with your subsequent renewal.

When it comes to renewals, as Server Pro doesn't transmit usage information back to us, we rely on customers to report their user count for license compliance. As mentioned above, as Server Pro doesn't enforce a strict user limit, and there's no explicit 'inactive' setting for users -- this means that if you're aware of inactive users, you have the option to exclude them when reporting your seat count to us.

If you are using SSO, an alternative way would be to report the number of users within your authorized group rather than the total number of active users in the Server Pro instance, as the latter might encompass older, inactive accounts.