Nebula [Licensing] - Use License Wizard to Assign/Unassign Licenses

This step by step guide explains how to bind and unbind the Nebula licenses from your devices while using the Smart License Assignment Wizard to ease the allocation in a large-scale implementation, so you can have a hassle-free assignation while ensuring that all your licenses expire on the same desired date.

The Smart License Assignment Wizard works with every type of license that you can register into your organization.

1. License Status and Actions

2. Smart License Assignment Wizard

3. Unbind the licenses from a device

1.License Status and Actions

In order to explain the binding process, we first need to take a look to the different License status which are defined as follow:

• Unused   – the license has not been assigned to a device. 
• Inactive  – license is assigned to a device but is not counting yet (e.g. PRO license is not yet enabled in the ORG because other devices do not have an assigned license.)
• Queued   – license is assigned to a device and is ready to replace the active license once this expired.
• Active   – license is assigned to a device and is counting down

The status can be summarized as follow:

2. Smart License Assignment Wizard

You have a hundred devices under your organization and wish to use the Nebula Professional Pack services, got all the licenses needed for the period you plan to use the service and now you wish to assign those licenses but the quantity is just overwhelming. Here is where the Smart License Assignment Wizard comes into play.

Note: only licenses that are in the "Unused" status can be bound to your devices.

To access the wizard you can enter the following page:

Organization-wide > License & Inventory > Device tab

• Select the devices to which you want to assign the licenses. You can make use of the filters to get those devices that are "Unlicensed" or are soon to have their license expired.
• Once the devices are selected, click the Action button located on the top of the table and select "Assign license".
• The Assign license Wizard will appear and will contain the information of those licenses that is still in "unused" status and can be assigned to the selected devices. A summary of the available amount and type of license will be displayed on the top of the pop-up window, you might remove some license type if you don't wish to assign it at the moment.

• There are 3 different types of License assignment modes: Minimum Period, Assign All and Target Expiration Date.

Assign Minimum Period:

When you have multiple unused licenses and some of a shorter duration (1 month), these shorter duration licenses will be the only ones that will be automatically assigned to the devices in the table, assigning one license per device.

Assign All:

All the unused licenses will be distributed among the devices in the table. Please note that if you have more licenses than devices, the devices on top of the table will be assigned with more licenses than others, to totally distribute the number of available licenses.

Target Expiration Date:

With this mode, you first need to set the date till when you want your License to be working and then the Nebula smart license assignment wizard will allocate the unused licenses among the devices in the table to meet this target.

This mode is useful to have imitated the previous license co-termination model.

A warning message will appears if there are insufficient licenses to reach the target date set, so more licenses need to be added in order to achieve the co-termination of the service.

The above-explained modes are ways that the system provides to allocate your licenses automatically, but you can still override the license assignment by selecting "Custom assignment" or simply by modifying the entry in the "Select # of license" action button.

• Once the assignment of the license is the desired, you can proceed to click Finish and the licenses will be assigned to the devices.

You can also execute the Smart License Assigned Wizard from the License, however, this will include all the devices from the organization in the table which will then need your manual editing to only leave the devices you need. 

3. Unbind the licenses from a device

If the Professional/Plus pack service is not yet activated in the Organization, the license status will be shown as "Inactive" as explained in the diagram below. Only during this status you can unassigned licenses from the device and bring it back to Unused status.

• In the Device tab, select the device that has the Inactive license assigned and hit the Action button to see the "Undo assign" option. Alternatively, you can search for the license key to unassigned in the License tab and select the "Undo assign" option from the Action menu.
• After clicking on "Undo assign" a pop-up window will appear and then you can see a summary of the action that will take place:

• Hit the ok button and now the license status is changed to "Unused" and can be assigned again if needed using the Smart License Assignment Wizard.

Once the license is in "Queue" or "Active" status, the license is already counting down and it can only be transferred to another device in the same or different organization that you own. 

To transfer an active license,  use the Transfer license covered in the following article:

How to transfer your used Nebula device License to other devices?