In this area we will post useful information covering how subscription licenses are managed and controlled.
A Subscription License is an annual license that includes all updates during the subscription period. The licensing of the subscriptions is managed using your Trimble ID and a cloud based license management system.
The licenses can be easily assigned and reassigned to users that have access to your licenses, and your administrator(s) control who can get access to which types of licenses that you have available.
The beauty of the subscription licensing is that it is more flexible than a TBC Hardware USB key or a TBC Network License - the latter of which requires all of the seats on the license to be the same. In the subscription license you can have any number of subscription configurations and any number of users that can take advantage of the licenses.
Subscription licenses can also be checked out if you need to work off line for any period of time, the licenses will work without an internet connection for up to 30 days. Licenses can be checked back in by an administrator or by the user when they come back into an office environment where they have internet connectivity.
By being more flexible, as a customer you can select the system configurations that make sense for your team and approach to modeling or takeoff - you can minimize the number of seats that you have that for example do full Takeoff, Utility Takeoff or Corridor Mass Haul, and maximize the number of main stream seat configurations that are used by the majority of the people in your team.
You can build a “production line” approach to modeling, where the start of the process can be handled by a user with a basic license, and then the mainstream processes like Data Prep can be handled by a Main Stream user and then the higher end processes like Takeoff, Reporting, Mass Haul etc. can be tackled by the most experienced members of the team using the higher end license(s).
Note that if you have 3 seats of a specific license type available and you allow those 3 seats to be accessed by a pool of people rather than assigning a specific seat to a specific person, you will likely have to use License Manager on startup each day to go and grab an available license seat on your license server. I have had reports that it can take several attempts to grab a license in this manner - that could be caused by the pool of users all trying to take a license from the server - and there not being sufficient seats available.
What can’t a subscription license currently do?
Current limitations on the subscription licensing include
- As you purchase more seats of software on your license, dates cannot currently be aligned to a common expiry / renewal date. Each subscription has a date that is 12 months (or a multiple of 12 months) from the initial purchase date.
- You currently cannot upgrade a subscription from a lower level subscription to a higher level subscription. Trimble however can cancel the remaining period of a current subscription and use that as a credit against the purchase of a higher level subscription for a new 12 month period.
- There is no current ability to license a subscription for periods shorter than a full year subscription.
The following video by Scott Bridges of Trimble talks through the subscription license manager