Swimming to the bottom of License Pools

The concept of a license pool is fairly unique to Nitro-LM.  Each pool is attached to a company.  A company can have as many different pools as you can define.  It really depends on how complex you need to make your access restriction rules.  Using the concept of pools, you can do some unique things like bundling software into suites.  For example, if you had three software products, you could put 5 licenses in a pool and allow the customer to use those 5 licenses in any way they chose across the products.  Need more developers using product A this week?  No problem, just release the license from product B and use them in A.  In a nutshell, a pool is a group of licenses along with all the rules for getting access to those licenses.

Rules are broken down into three categories: product associations, usage restrictions, and access restrictions.

Product Associations
Product associations are just that; associating a software product with a pool.  You can have any combination of software products in a pool, or you could even break up software products into different pools.  To associate a product with a pool, you simply drag and drop a product from the master list to the customer-specific area.

Usage Restrictions
Usage restrictions allow you to restrict the time-period and number of licenses at the specific product level.  If a customer buys a yearly subscription to product A and a subscription to product B two months later, you can handle that with a usage restriction.  You can set up product A and product B to expire independently.  You can also fix the number of licenses allowed to be used for each product from this screen.  If you set up higher numbers than the total in your pool, this will allow a certain number of licenses to float between products.  If you had 5 licenses in the pool, but assigned 3 for max licenses to both product A and B, you’d have one license that could be used for either product A or B.

Access Restrictions
Access restrictions are what controls WHO has access to a license. By adding included and excluded e-mail domains, you can define which companies can get a license. You can also build up this restriction list using individual e-mail addresses. The screenshot is showing an example where anyone with a @somecompany.com e-mail address can get a license except for the individual fired@somecompany.com. A consultant from othercompany.com is also given access.