Subscription Entitlement Ideas

Although there is a "set all to denied" selection at the top of the page, the "setting" for all listed Bentley programs STARTS as allowed on any given client account. This is the crux of my suggestion, not the lack of a way to change the setting quickly. This solution does NOT already exist, simply by the advent of all products being able to be used as soon as the client account is created and users added, regardless of licenses actually purchased by that client.

To be blunt, navigating the Bentley web console for a first-time client is a nightmare level learning curve. I finally figured most of it out (I hope), but it's taken me almost a year and a half to do so. I would hope to prevent my troubles for your future clients, and help prevent needless paperwork and toil on your company employees for having to issue credits.

By the time I figured out that my users could run programs we hadn't even purchased licenses for, I had already created several other "rules" for the licenses we had previous to that purchase due to conversations I had with support, because we had overages that were due to my lack of understanding of your company's licensing structure allowing multiple overages and not warning users unless I set it to do so (again... something that might be a good idea to be set as a "default" is to have the overage warning for a given program auto-populate for the client with the limit set at the amount of licenses a client actually purchases, not be a setting that has to be manually TURNED ON and set to a specific amount).

I was not willing to risk overriding ALL of my previously entered settings and warning messages by using the "quick" denied setting and then have to go in again and re-set all my "allow" and warnings for overage use on each individual license we do have for my users. If I missed anything... we would be charged for the overages.. and this time, there would be no cancellation of the bill due to an agreement from last time's correction of my misunderstanding. I wasn't taking any chances.. so I was stuck with the tediously slow way of correcting all the other program accesses.

Because the licensing for Bentley products is so convoluted (not your fault, individually, just very admin-involved to be able to restrict access), the system currently allows for a lot of "unauthorized" usage that could be more simply prevented by the programs starting in a non-allowed state, rather than having to be set to do so by the sometimes-clueless-to-start administrator for the account. (In this case, me. Judging from multiple forums, I'm not alone, though.)

It shouldn't be incumbent on the client to have to research how to turn off everything they didn't ask for (and probably didn't even know they had access to) before they get charged for it, while also trying to figure out how to just do the basic tasks of creating users and getting information about how to get their purchased program downloaded.

No other company I know of allows a new client account to use a software product (unless on a trial period) without paying for it before using it if they intend to charge for it. You can advise your account holders so they become aware that they can "use" products without purchasing a direct license if they choose to by turning access to the program on, but it shouldn't be needful for them to be surprised with what appears to the client (until your support explains the licensing model to them) to be "hidden" charges on their account. It makes Bentley look bad.

Thank you for the clarification. I think I understand that you're talking about applications that you've bought a certain number of licenses for. Your users are also allowed access to other products, such as gINT Professional, because the Subscription you participate in.

I can see that you have gone in to each product that is covered by that subscription and denied access. That approach should work, though I know it probably took a lot of effort to hit each product. My suggestion for others who have a similar concern would be to utilize the Default Access control available at the top of the Applications and Services page to set the starting position of all entitlements in that country to Denied and then go and override the Access setting for specific products you want to allow.

On the applications available to companies (such as Bentley's gINT program suite, for example) all program access licensing not directly purchased by a given company should be set to "deny".

Taking the gINT example: My company purchased one license of gINT Logs from your products available, yet when I downloaded the "gINT Logs" labeled installation, I was not aware that the download ALSO included the gINT Professional and one other version, nor was that mentioned anywhere in the description of the product download. When the product was installed on one of our units, the Professional version was (accidentally) selected by the person installing the program. Because the "Professional" version (which we have NEVER purchased a license for) was set as a global "allow" for licensing, we then incurred overage use charges for a program that never should have been able to be active or opened by an end-user in the first place. Setting the global list to "deny" as default would insure that companies like mine don't have to send in requests for corrections to licensing use because that program wasn't intended to have EVER been used and charged for use to that company.

I have since personally set all Bentley product offerings to "deny" for my company unless we have directly purchased a license for that specific program on my administrative console in the Bentley web interface.

My company is fairly restrictive in what programs can be loaded on a computer and how installing programs is locked to the I.T. department for the majority of our units. This may not be the case in all smaller companies. What if an employee from a company that doesn't restrict access to installations gets the idea that they can get copies of Bentley programs and install them just to "try them out" on a company account? How much overage can a single user rack up before a company figures out the next quarter, when they get a huge bill, that they have a bunch of Bentley products running with a user for their account that should never have been able to open in the first place without an account admin allowing it? A global "deny" setting would prevent this.

It's not that difficult to set a procedure for, "Ok... company XXX just purchased a license for product YYY. Set the licensing for THAT PRODUCT (and it's associated licenses) to allow for that company." It's also probably a lot less difficult than reversing overage charges that shouldn't have happened.

Thank you.

Can you please add a description of what it is you're asking for? It's not clear to me just based on the title.