Partner License User Count Limit, Is it big enough?

Business Central/NAV Technical Forum
1

I am hoping that other partners on this forum have run into the same problem. The company I work for is a NAV partner. I have developed a time entry system in NAV 4.x that allows us to post our time to the Jobs module instead of payroll since our business is driven by billing our clients. I have everything working like it should, but now I am at a wall because of our partner license user count.

Microsoft is telling me that they will only give us 20 user licenses as a partner and anything beyond that must be purchased. Back before Microsoft bought Navision, the partner license had a much larger user count and to be honest, I never really thought about it until now. For our basic accounting functions, the 20 user limit is fine. However, if we are to seriously roll this new time entry piece out, the cost of buying all the user licenses is outrageous since we have 200+ employees. I guess my big problem is that we only need access for about 20 tables, forms, reports, etc. and it seems a pretty steep price just to directly enter our time in NAV.

Here is the question. Do any other partners out there have a similar situation where you have a small custom built module that everyone needs to use but you don’t have a large enough user count to effectively use the module? If so, were you able to find a workable solution? Since it is time entry, we can’t break up our 200+ employees into 20 person groups and say “Enter your time between the hours of A and B.” They really need access at any point and some of us, me included, might talk to a new client every 15 minutes so I could potentially need to be in NAV all day.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

2

Well… you are apparently using NAV for your own accounting. As far as I understand it, for this purpose you will need to actually purchase a license, with the proper number of users. The partner license is to be used for your customers.

3

Daniel, maybe in US its different, but in Europe (all ? at least in my country) Partner license includes using it for Partner’s OWN accounting needs, too. This is only logical, that Partner uses himself the product it offers to clients :slight_smile:

As to user count - I recall Gold Partner had more users, but 200 - its too much to ask anyway. David, do you REALLY need concurent login of all 200 employees?

Being a Partner - how many times you yourself have explained to your clients, that it doesn’t matter how much (or little) functionality user exploits - there are no separate (smaller) licenses for only one app area - all or nothing only [;)]

4

It was our understanding that we were supposed to use our partner license to run our business and we confirmed that with Microsoft. The partner license is used to setup customer database, but not run them. We have always used our partner license to run our business. Now the development license for partners is not supposed to be used to run a business. Maybe I need to clarify that. We are running on the internal partner use license (024), not the development license (004). If I am mistaken on this point, then my question would be why give us 2 different licenses?

5

I agree that we always tell clients they have to buy a license to get in the system. It may be splitting hairs, but the difference here is that Navision gave us that large user limit and Microsoft has now taken it away. It’s really funny because if our license had not expired last month, we would still be running on a larger user count.

To my knowledge, we don’t get more licenses for being a Gold Partner. All they do is refer me to Microsoft Business Solutions division. If there is something where a Gold Partner gets more licenses, I’d love to know because we are a Gold Partner.

On the 200 logins, that’s been my dilemma. 95% of the time, 50 or 60 licenses would probably cover it, but we have a deadline for all time to be entered by 5:30pm every Friday. Given that deadline, everyone is logged in from 4:00pm to 5:30pm on Friday entering their time so I would need 200+ concurrent sessions at that point.

We are looking at pushing this to the web using PHP, but again, what Microsoft has told me is that we are not to use tools outside of those for NAV (i.e. NAV Client and NAS) for adding, deleting, or updating data in the database or we are in violation of the license agreement. At this point, we are looking at just doing the process in PHP to a different database and then doing an export from PHP, import to NAV to stay within the “NAV Tools” world. It just stinks because now we have to rewrite the same logic that is already sitting in NAV over to PHP.

6

We used our partner license to run the business, but had less than 20 users, so never encountered the problem, but we did use it to run the business.

I am also with Modris, 200 concurrent users? If you need them, then you will need to swallow it and purchase it, otherwise design something else to capture the data and update it periodically! (Sorry wrote this whilst you were writing your replies, so they were not there talking about these issues when I wrote this, but yes it would seem you need to buy them or go to a two stage approach with a different database!)

I thought license expired yearly, or every 2 years, so this is not a Navision/Microsoft distinction as Microsoft bought Navision 6 years ago. Obviously Microsoft feel they allow a partner free access to a “limit” after this you pay, and the limit now is 20 users - if Microsoft will not budge there is nothing you can do.

7

you can also look at webservice and do an exe upgrade and use CDO license.

8

I’ve read the comments and the arguments.

This is poor business realtionship management on behalf of Microsoft. No doubt caused by a few orgainsations who may have taken advantage of the previous licencing policy!

9

We also internally a similar solution to insert hours and expenses to projects, but we took a different approach. We are using a web interface to insert values to projects. In most customers the only provided external access to consultants is web so time tracking and expenses must be done via web. We are using this solution since NAV 4.0 and works like a charm.

Regarding concurrent user limit I don’t see any problems since Microsoft is giving it free for partners. Microsoft sets a limit for each piece of software that partners can use internally, after that number every partner much buy licenses.

10

Hmm it may work like a charm, but it sounds illegal to me.

11

It’s legal, we have a correct license for that.

Just be more clear. A independent web application and then imported periodically to NAV.

12

If you think about it, this question makes no sense at all. If Microsoft were to give a free 200 user license to partners, then there would be no customers any more, since they would all just become Navision partners and not have to buy a license.

I know of companies that have become Navision partners just to save the partner margin on the license, so if they could get it fully for free there would be a lot of “partners”.

13

David,

I understand your position, but what I think is missing here is the fact that we had the 200+ licenses until last month. This isn’t MS giving away free licenses now. This is NAV did this way back when and MS is coming in and saying “No more”. I’ve spoken with a bunch of higher ups @ MS & MBS, but they are unwilling to budge on the issue. We have implemented a plan to purchase some user licenses every quarter, but without giving the exact number…to buy them all at once would be in excess of $400,000 even with our partner margin.

One solution that I know works is to simply set up a Terminal Server, turn off the Windows Time service, and set the date back to June 1, 2009. At that point, our license is valid and we just have to change the Work Date to be the correct date. I even got around that by a few lines of code and an extra field in a table, but I don’t think that (A) the solution is legal, or (B) that it is reasonable to go to such great lengths.

With regard to the customers becoming partners if 200 free user licenses were given to partners, I would imagine that if that happened, MS would change their policy to state partners had to generate X amount of sales per year to stay a partner. I also noticed some posts about don’t we do the same thing to customers when we make them buy licenses to access one area. My answer to that is no because we aren’t comparing apples to apples. I don’t tell a customer to buy 20 licenses and then later on cut their license count to 5 and say “buy more licenses.” I realize in this situation, we didn’t purchase the licenses in the first place, but to give them to us up front and then make such a drastic cut seems a little harsh.

Below is what our license looked like before the expiration message appeared:

Maximum No. of Sessions
Total…: 1,251
Any…: 251
Application Server…: 1,000
NAVI Hub…: 1

Our new license looks like this:

Maximum No. of Sessions
Total…: 1,020
Any…: 20
Application Server…: 1,000
NAVI Hub…: 1

As you can see, we clearly had 200+ licenses available to us. Part of this may be caused by the fact that I had one of my staff handling our NAV licensing and MS Gold Partner account, but he has left the company and I was asked to take over those aspects. Maybe we were told before now and it was just never communicated to me; I’m just not sure. I’m not trying to cheat MS out of their money or do anything illegal. I just can’t accept the fact that we are the only partner that has encountered this situation. Maybe part of the problem is that we are an accounting firm as far as primary business activity. Only 20 of us (10%) are in the consulting division that resells NAV. Maybe if we had a consulting division of 100 (50%), we could afford to pay for all the licenses outright all at once. I currently have about 8 different ways to work around the license issue, some take time, some are illegal, some fall into the “it appears to work, but is it legal?” realm. I was just hoping someone else had encountered the same problem and been through the same frustration with Microsoft, but managed to find a reasonable work around.

14

This little gem helps clarify things a bit.

Basically this is exactly what I was referring to. The whole idea of the Partner license is to use it to run your NAVISION business on. i.e. the Navision system you use for free from Microsoft really was meant for companies whose primary line of business is selling Navision. In your case 20/200 means that only 10% of the users are using the system for Navision related business. So when you say…

. Possibly in this case they see this happening in your case and thus did exactly that and changed their policy.

Anyway I am just stating from my experience, not trying to knock you for tryiing, nor MS for preventing. I can see both sides of the arguement, but I can also say that I have seen a number of companies whose prime business was not Navision, and they were forced to buy an enduser license for their non Navision related business, so I do not believe this to be a unique scenario, maybe it just took them a while to catch up.

I do agree with you though that under these conditions they should have given you a lot of advance notice, not simply springing it on you like this.

Oh and to be devil’s advocate, Navision have never given 200 user Partner licenses for running their accounting on. They did have special licenses that allowed partners to test large numebrs of users for perfromance testing purposes only, but if you read the contract, those licenses were spceificaly NOT to be used for internal accounting. It was Microsoft that later streamlined the various different types of licenses not PC&C.

Anyway, I am sorry that I can not provide you with any news that you would want to hear. I think only Microsoft can help you on this.

15

At this point, I am going to close the thread. My manager, the IT manager, and I are going to meet this week to review the options we have come up with and figure out the best way to proceed given Microsoft’s response.

Thank you to everyone that took the time to read this and weigh in.