This question comes up relatively frequently so I asked Trimble for a demo subscription yesterday so that I could capture a vide and work process that covers how subscriptions work with RPS All Tools commands.
When you purchase a subscription, a license is assigned to your Trimble ID for a subscription period e.g. 1 year. For example I was assigned a Site and Field license by Charlie Sorg at Trimble yesterday. Charlie is the admin of the license so as a user I can do little other than use the license that he assigned to me.
First you have to have a subscription that includes the Survey Advanced module of TBC as TML commands are tied to that as a minimum level of TBC product that allows TMLs to run. We support the following versions of TBC - v5.33, v5.41, v5.52, v5.6x and v5.7x
Second you have to have an appropriate version of TBC that supports the correct version of Trimble ID to run the TMLs. We use the Trimble ID system, to authenticate you as a user with a license of our command library. To se up Trimble ID you need to do the following
- Go to the support menu, select Options and in Options select External Services Profiles. If you do not already have a Trimble ID setup you need to add Trimble Identity as an External Service
- Click Create, select Trimble Identity profile and enter the name Trimble ID. Click Sign In and that will open a web page in your browser. If you do not yet have a Trimble ID you need to Create a Trimble ID. Click the button in the browser and follow the steps provided. This will involve receiving and acknowledging an email to your provided email address to validate your email address.
- Sign in using your Trimble ID once you have it created. Once you are signed in, TBC Options should show that your Trimble ID is Active and that you are Signed In. You can now close the Options command.,
- If you have never used your subscription license or if it was assigned to someone else for a time and now you have it back again, you will need to configure your license. To do this follow the next steps.
The subscription license once configured will be identified and used at start up, each time you run TBC. To configure the license do the following
- Go to the Support menu and select License Manager
- In the License Type field select Subscription
- The license manager will then check your Trimble ID against the license server to find the license that has been assigned to you. If more than one license has been assigned to you, multiple options will be available to you in the Subscription field of the command dialog. If it does not populate for any reason hit the small green refresh button to the right of the subscription field.
- Select the subscription that you want to use and click Apply - this will assign the subscription license to you from now on. The admin can decide how long the subscription will be assigned to you, if for any reason the license drops after a period of time, contact your license administrator. If you do not know who your license administrator is, click the License Administrator button and it will be displayed to you.
- If you are going off line to work on a project where there is poor or no internet connection, you can check out a subscription license for up to 30 days and work off line. Click the Check Out button and select the duration that you wish to check out your license. This will allow you to work off line for that period of time without checking the license server for an available license. If you have a license checked out and you want to check it back in, you can click the Check in Early button to return the license to the license pool. Note: Your admin can always override your requests and can control how much time you are allowed to check out licenses. Please discuss with them your needs if the system is not providing you with appropriate access.
Once you have your license assigned, in order to run the Rockpile Solutions commands, you will need to exit all instances of TBC and restart TBC for the commands to become functional. On startup, TBC checks to see if you have a Survey Advanced license and once found enables the TML Command capability. If the license is not found at start up the macro command menus will be greyed out because the macro command capability is disabled. If this occurs, check your license setup in License Manager, ensure that you have a subscription license and then restart TBC again. Until you have a subscription license assigned to you, and that license is found at TBC start up, you will not be able to run the macro commands.
The video below shows you how this works