Floating license administration

We will walk through a fictional but realistic example with screenshots. You can also try this process yourself: follow this link. Contact our staff to get the user name and password to examine the site.

Floating license server

Consider the case of Queensborough university. Several labs at the university use PowerReports - software made by iPower. iPower uses QuidLM to sell and deliver licenses to their customers, and another section of this documentation describes their part of the process. Queensborough university uses QuidLM license server to make PowerReports floating licenses available to their staff. They chose floating licenses because of the flexibility they provide:

• Each floating license can be used on many devices - just not at the same time.
• The university has staff in different time zones - and staff in one time zone can be using licenses while the staff in a different time zone is off work.

The license server technology is provided by QuidLM, and the server can be run on Queensborough university's hardware, or can be rented from QuidLM, as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

PSN walk-through

Irene works at the IT department of Queensborough university and has an administrator account of QuidLM license server. Irene received a PSN from iPower, and she can use it to bring floating licenses to the server.

Irene can enter the PSN into the server and immediately see that 10 licenses become available. Irene can allow everyone in the company to run the software that requires these licenses, on the first come/first serve basis. The 11th user will not be allowed to use the software, as there are only 10 licenses. However, as soon as one of the 10 shuts down the software, the next person can start using it.

Irene can also assign some number of licenses to certain users or a group of users - those licenses will only be available to that group.