Restrictions tab extended to User licenses

FlexNet Manager Suite version 2020 R2

Many license types support a Restrictions tab in their license properties sheet. The most common use case is to enforce publishers' legal restrictions, such as a discounted license that can only be used within a particular country. The restriction is enforced through enterprise groups (such as locations) – if a license is restricted to a particular location, then consumption can only occur for devices assigned to the same location (or descendants thereof). No consumption of this restricted license can occur from anything outside the specific enterprise group hierarchy.

From this release, the Restrictions tab has now been extended to the User license type. For these licenses, it is not group assignments of the inventory device that are checked, but group assignments of the user. The user may be the primary user of the device (either the assigned user or the calculated user), or a user identified by application usage tracking. (As always, an inventory device for which there is no user record also counts as consuming an entitlement from a User license, and in this rare case, the group assignment of the device is still relevant.)

Because the users are assessed case-by-case, it is now possible to have two users of the same installation on a single device consuming from different User licenses. For example, a license restricted to London may be consumed by a user with a matching group assignment (also assigned to the location London); but a hot-desking visitor who is not assigned to London cannot break the restriction, and so must consume from another license – either an unrestricted User license, or one with a restriction matching her own group assignment. Where the used software is licensable only by a User license type, and neither an unrestricted User license nor one with a restriction matching the visitor's group assignment exists, the visitor appears in the License Compliance > Unlicensed Installations page.

Two corner-case scenarios with User licenses may result in correctly increased license consumption following this enhancement:

• Previously, if the primary user on a device consumed an entitlement for using a local installation, a second user of the same installation (who was not already counted against another User license for use elsewhere) was not counted; and this oversight has been corrected.
• Some User licenses restrict the number of installations that a user can access. Previously, if the same user was registered as the primary user on more than one device and used the same User-licensed software on multiple of these, only the single primary user was counted; and this has now been corrected so that, for licenses with such a restriction, each installation used by the primary user is correctly counted.