License profiles

License profiles are managed in the IPS Manager, in the 'Product licensing' screen (to open it, click the 'Product licensing' item in the left-hand menu).

A license profile is a means for IPS Administrators to restrict the use of one or more product licenses to a specific group of users. Only the users belonging to the configured 'license profile' workgroup, which is linked to a license profile, will be able to acquire a license from any product license that is assigned to that profile. Hence license profiles implement a form of 'license affinity' behavior for license allocation.

Note: When license profiles are enabled for a Planning Space application, any Named User licenses applicable to that application will be disabled, and all user-based access control to licenses must be implemented using the license profile feature.

Multiple profiles for the same workgroup can be defined so that 'overlapping' sets of licenses are available to a group of users. This is useful in cases such as when licenses are about to expire and a switchover to new licenses can be configured so that users do not experience any interruption to using Planning Space.

License profiles can only be used with product licenses that have been installed locally in IPS Server, i.e., not with a license server proxy.

See the topic License profiles user example for a detailed user story involving license profiles.

Application setting 'License.SelectionMode'

This setting must be set to 'Profile' to enable the license profile mode for allocation of licenses to users who want to use that application.

Important: For 'Profile' mode to be used, the 'Enable Anonymous License Access' service setting (see Service configuration) must be set to 'False'.

In 'Profile' mode there is no manual selection by users via the License Manager dialog. The configured profiles must cover all groups of users.

'License Profile' setting for workgroups

This is a check box setting for individual workgroups, with default setting 'disabled'. If enabled, then the workgroup can be used as a workgroup to be linked to a license profile. Only one workgroup at a time can be linked to a profile, however the same workgroup can be associated to multiple profiles.

User accounts that are members of the workgroup will be granted access to licenses via the linked license profile(s), for those applications that have been set to use 'Profile' mode.

License profile configuration

License profiles are managed in the IPS Manager, in the 'Product licensing' screen. To open it, click the 'Product licensing' item in the left-hand menu.

Click the '+Add license profiles' button to create a new profile:

Type in the 'License profile name' and the required 'License profile workgroup' (only one workgroup).

For each license, tick the check box in the 'Assign' column to assign the license to this profile. A product license must only be associated with one license profile.

For an assigned license, use the check box in the 'Acquire by Default' column to specify that a user should be granted a license by default immediately after the user launches the Planning Space application. Otherwise, the license request will be handled only when the particular application module is loaded in the Planning Space client.

Click the 'OK' button to close the dialog and save the profile.

The table of profiles in the 'Manage license profiles' section summarizes the configuration of each profile. There are 'Edit' and 'Remove' buttons for each profile.

The ordering of the profiles can be edited using the buttons in the 'Reorder' column. This ordering is used to determine the order of usage of licenses when there are 'overlapping' licenses for application modules, i.e., a license for an application module could be acquired by a user from more than one license profile (product license file). It is recommended that the license profile order should be from the most capable to the least: for example, profile 1 contains 'PlanningSpace (Concurrent)', and profile 2 contains 'PlanningSpace Dataflow and Economics'. This is to prevent issues with multiple allocation, for example if a user launches Economics and then Portfolio, she would be assigned both licenses if the more capable license was not selected first.

Product licenses within one license profile should not have overlapping license modules; if this is the case, a warning will be displayed to tell the administrator that license allocation behavior will not be well-defined.