Supportworks 7.x Licensing Policy
| Status: | Released |
|---|---|
| Version: | 1.2 |
| Authors: | HTL QA |
| Applies to: | Supportworks ESP |
Supportworks 7.x Licensing Policy
This document describes the licensing model for all Supportworks ESP system variants. While most components are part of the Supportworks core product, there are various optional components that are licensed individually according to the customer’s requirements. This document sets out how the licensing model is defined for each component and indicates any changes in the model that have occurred between product versions.
Overall Licensing Policy
The Supportworks platform provides a comprehensive and flexible licensing scheme that allows Hornbill customers to optimize the cost of the licenses to best suit the needs of their organization.
The end user may install the Supportworks client software on any number of computers, as long as those computers fall under the control and responsibility of the same legal entity to whom the Supportworks software license terms are formally agreed.
In order to ensure that Hornbill operates a fair licensing scheme, our policy dictates that we draw a clear distinction between someone being supported (a customer) and someone participating in the process of providing support (a Supportworks user).
Our policy states that anyone "participating" in the process of providing support in any way is a "user" of the system and should therefore be licensed under our commercial terms. Conversely, our policy also states that anyone "being supported" (a customer, for example) does not need to be a licensed user of the system.
In a typical internal IT support environment, it is entirely possible for a user of the system to also be a customer. In this scenario, the licensing policy above must be applied, based on the role individuals play when they interact with the system. This is especially important when customization of the system is being considered. The system enforces this policy by superficially identifying the role through the session created when they log in. With one specific exception, it is only when logging into the system as a user (or analyst, if you prefer) will you be able to participate in workflow that includes approvals.
Current Product Pricing
You should refer to the product/services catalog provided on Hornbill’s intranet for current product pricing. This document covers licensing issues, not actual pricing.
Terminology
The following is a quick glossary of terminology used when describing Supportworks licensing.
Concurrent User License
This term describes an "open" license that is consumed by any Supportworks user currently connected to the Supportworks server with a valid, authenticated session. Such a license may be totally unreserved, or it may be reserved for a specific group of users.
Named User License
This term describes a license that is consumed by a Supportworks user currently connected, as a named user, to the Supportworks server with a valid, authenticated session. As of version 6.0, named user licenses were only provided for use with the Web Client / Analyst Portal (except on Essentials systems, where they could be used with both native and Web-based clients, and this in fact is still the only kind of license allowed on Essentials). As of version 7.4.0, however, named user licenses on Professional and Enterprise systems became valid for use with the native client as well.
Customer
This term describes someone who is accessing the system through one of the customer-facing interfaces such as Web SelfService or e-mail Auto Responder.
Authorizer
This term describes someone who participates in the workflow of the customer-support process for the sole purpose of authorizing a request to allow it to progress.
SelfService Instance
This term describes a single instance of a SelfService interface. Because the SelfService interface is HTML based, it is typical that a customer would customize this to provide service-specific information or corporate presentation to the public users of the system. Typically, for each different SelfService configuration, you would create a separate SelfService instance on your Supportworks Server.
Supportworks ESP Core Services
Supportworks Core Services provides a Web server, a database server and a Web-scripting engine, and is a pre-requisite core for any Hornbill product (currently Supportworks and Assetworks). This core is only provided as part of a Hornbill solution but is provided free of any license charge. The Core Services will not install unless you have been provided with a valid Supportworks or Assetworks activation key.
Supportworks ESP System Variants
There are currently three licensed variants of the Supportworks product: Essentials, Professional and Enterprise. The primary differences between the three broadly reflect the functionality expected by small, medium and large organisations, respectively. Customers licensed for Essentials will forgo certain product features and sales facilities that are only provided with the Professional and Enterprise variants. Professional and Enterprise systems are very similar to each other in terms of user features and both provide extensive customisation facilities. Customers licensed for the Enterprise variant will be given the capability to carry out even more complex customisations of the Supportworks solution, which will not be available to customers licensed for the Professional variant.
It is the Enterprise variant of Supportworks that our consulting team uses to build customer solutions, and our application development team uses to create our template configurations. The Enterprise variant is made available to companies outside of Hornbill only once they have met the criteria and qualified for the Enterprise Partner Program.
Licensing of Individual Supportworks ESP Components
This section provides a description of how the licensing model for each major component (including clients) works.
Note: Any component or piece of functionality not specifically mentioned in this document as a licensable entity should be assumed to be provided with the basic product, with no special license required.
Supportworks Application Server
The Supportworks server is licensed on a per-system basis. You need one server license (whether Essentials, Professional or Enterprise) for each system you have configured as a Supportworks application server, where the "system" is identified by an electronic serial number called a System ID. In a typical deployment, a Supportworks solution will need a single application server regardless of the number of Supportworks users or supported end-users there may be. If you need to run additional redundant servers for backup or resilience purposes, then you will need an appropriate type of Supportworks server license for each of these.
Supportworks Server – Evaluation
Most prospects at some point through the sales cycle will require a live evaluation of the software and, in some cases, existing customers may require a temporary system in order to perform testing or hardware change-over activities. Hornbill will provide evaluation licenses free of charge to customers and/or prospects on the following basis:
- A standard evaluation license will be issued for a period of 30 days but, if authorized by the account or sector manager, this can be extended for up to a maximum of 90 days.
- A customer or prospect may be given no more than two evaluation licenses inside any given 12-month period. Any extension to this needs approval from at least one company director.
- Prospects will be limited to 5 concurrent users during an evaluation unless otherwise approved by the account or sector manager handling the customer or prospect.
- Existing customers wishing to use a temporary server for the purpose of testing or migration can be issued a key with anything up to the same number of concurrent users that their live system is licensed for.
- Customers who need testing facilities for longer periods need a Development/Test Server license.
Supportworks Server – Development/Test Server
Customers often have a need for a Development/Test server to:
- Test new software upgrades before deploying to their live environment.
- Make changes to their configuration(s) and test these changes before deploying them to their live environment.
To accommodate these requirements, Hornbill will provide a Development/Test (D/T) server license free of charge for the purpose of carrying out these activities. However, although no license fee is charged for the D/T license, Hornbill will charge support/maintenance at the current rate for each D/T license issued to account for the additional support overhead. A D/T license will be issued only in accordance with the following conditions:
- The D/T server license will be provided with no more than 5 concurrent client user licenses.
- The customer must already have at least one Supportworks server that is fully licensed for at least 5 concurrent user licenses.
- Each organization will be restricted to one D/T server license unless otherwise agreed commercially.
- The D/T server license will be activated for a 12-month period from the date of issue.
- Organizations wishing to renew a D/T server license must request renewal of the D/T server license upon expiry of the previous server license.
- Under no circumstances should a D/T server license be used as a production server.
- Hornbill reserves the right to revoke any issued D/T server license at any time.
In some cases, a customer may require a D/T server license for load-testing purposes and therefore need more than 5 concurrent user licenses. Hornbill will issue a license key to accommodate this only upon receipt of a completed and signed "Supportworks Dev-Test License Key Request Form" from the customer.
With the information provided, Hornbill will assess each request on a case-by-case basis and, before issuing a license key, two of Hornbill’s directors must approve the request. Customers do not have an automatic right to receive a D/T server license - these are issued at Hornbill’s sole discretion. It should be noted that Hornbill will not under any circumstances issue extended license keys of this type for any longer than a 3-month period and will also limit the issue of such keys to no more than two in any calendar year for each customer.
Supportworks Server – Disaster Recovery Server
Some customers require a solution to allow for a backup server to be running with real time replication from the primary server, in order to provide fast system recovery in the event of a hardware or system failure on the primary server. It is possible to configure a second Supportworks application server as a disaster recovery server. Although Supportworks will not itself provide automatic fail-over, it will allow for the recovery server to be a real-time replicate of the primary server. In the event of a primary server failure, the system administrator can simply follow the switch-over procedure and ask the users to reconnect.
Any customer requiring this configuration needs to purchase a Disaster Recovery Server license, which will be subject to support and maintenance at our standard rates. The issued license key will be for the same number of concurrent/named users as the main server’s license key, but the use of the server will be restricted to replication server use only except in the case of a system failure, when the replication server may be used while the main server is being restored.
Supportworks User Access with a Concurrent License
Both native and Web-based clients can be licensed on a Concurrent User License basis. With this kind of license, you may have any number of Supportworks users registered on the system, but the total number of client connections (of the concurrent type) that can exist at any one time will be limited to the number of Concurrent User Licenses you have.
When terminating a native client session by logging out of the client, the concurrent user license is immediately returned back to the available concurrent user license pool ready for use by the next login to the system. However, when you log out of a Web-based session that was allocated from the concurrent license pool, you must note that in order to return the license back to the pool, you must choose the Log Out option; simply closing the browser will leave the license assigned to that session for 4 hours before the session times out. It is not possible to reduce this timeout period.
Supportworks User Access with a Named License
Both native and Web-based clients can be licensed on a Named User License basis. These licenses are less expensive than concurrent licenses but must be allocated to specific users before they can be used. On a non-Essentials system with both concurrent and named licenses, any login by a user who does not have a named license allocated to them will be treated as a concurrent type of connection and will use a concurrent license.
Supportworks Customer SelfService
The SelfService interface to Supportworks provides one or more Web interfaces to your customers, that is, people whom you as a Supportworks user interact with through the Supportworks system. The Supportworks ESP platform allows you to create one or more "SelfService instances", where an instance is a unique portal site that can be fully customized in isolation from any other instance. For each SelfService instance you wish to configure on your system, you will require a SelfService license. However, there is no limit or restriction on the number of customers who can access Supportworks through the SelfService interface.
It is not possible for customers logged into Supportworks via SelfService to participate in the approvals process of any workflow unless they are a named Approver (see below) because the licensing policy applied to the session established when logging in as a customer specifically prevents it. The one explicit exception to this is the ability for a person within the organization using a SelfService session to get notification and visibility of a change request from anyone who they are a direct manager for (defined in customer record's "Manager" field), and in this case it is possible to approve the request or manually defer the approval up to their immediate manager without the need for an Approver Licence. Any other type of workflow participation must be done through the user interfaces (native client, Web Client / Analyst Portal or PDA Client) or via an Approver license.
Supportworks Approver Licence
It is possible for customers using the system via self-service to participate in the process of providing support by reviewing and approving change requests and other workflow approvals. In order for a self-service user to be able to do this for requests that are not directly related to them or their immediate subordinates they need to be assigned an approver licence. An approver licence allows the customer (via the SelfService interface) to approve any process approvals assigned to them through automated workflow, and the BPM tool allows you to specify any customer (defined in the userdb table) as an approver so long as that customer has been assigned an approver licence.
Supportworks includes functionality known as Shared Mailboxes. These are special mailboxes that have all of the e-mail-to-call automation functionality built in. The ability to log, update and close calls, send call-action confirmations and generally interact with e-mail when handling calls can be done through a shared mailbox. The Supportworks server license includes two shared mailboxes. Additional shared mailboxes can be licensed as needed. Typically, you would need a shared mailbox for each unique address that you would like to handle/route through the Supportworks system. (The offer to obtain four free shared mailboxes as part of an upgrade from version 4.5x to 5.0 is no longer in force. Any customer upgrading now only gets two shared mailboxes.)
Customer Satisfaction Survey Module
Supportworks has an optional module that will allow you to automate the sending of transactional customer surveys when closing calls to provide the ability to allow you to measure the performance of your customer service provision. This module is licensed as a one-off cost per Supportworks server.
Supportworks Dashboard
This module is provided as part of the Supportworks client installation. There is no additional license required to use this software. However, when you run the Dashboard module and log into the Supportworks server via that module, a user license is consumed from the concurrent license pool.
Supportworks Ticker Bar
This module is provided as part of the Supportworks client installation. There is no additional license required to use this and there is no impact on the concurrent licenses available on the Supportworks system.
Supportworks Messenger
The Supportworks Messenger allows users not logged into the Supportworks system via the native client or a Web-based client to receive notifications and to see a list of calls that are currently assigned to them. The Messenger helps customers make best use of their concurrent license pool by allowing a greater number of users to receive notifications than they have concurrent licenses for. For each concurrent license purchased, you are provided with a single Messenger license. This gives you a free Messenger license per concurrent user.
You can purchase additional Messenger licenses up to a maximum ratio of 3 to 1. For example, if you purchase a ten-user concurrent license, you will be provided with ten Messenger licenses and you have the option to purchase up to an additional 20 Messenger licenses, giving you 30 Messenger licenses in total.
Supportworks Visual Process Manager (VPM)
This module is an option that can be purchased for Supportworks Professional systems but is provided free of charge as part of the Supportworks Enterprise system. The VPME (engine) is built into the core server for all Supportworks variants, so (as with client-side JavaScript) our professional services team are able to create, on an Enterprise system, functional processes for specific customer requirements during implementation and then transfer these processes to the customer's Professional system for use. However, if a customer wants the ability to create/modify/view functional processes themselves, then they will need to purchase a Supportworks VPM license.
When a customer purchases such a license, this is typically applied to their maintained development/test server, on which the customer can then create/edit VPME scripts and test the changes. Once the scripts are ready for production use, they can be placed on to the customer's production server(s), which do not themselves need a VPM license.