Getting the most out of user licences

One of the challenges faced by education institutions at the start of each new term is deprovisioning software licences from students who have switched to other courses or left. The good news is that the Academic Software platform automates deprovisioning, enabling you to reuse licences for other users.

Optimising user licences

Named user licences are a common licensing model in education. It allows education institutions to buy licences for specific students and educators rather than the entire institution. This can be more cost-effective because it allows educational institutions to only pay for the licences that are actually needed.

But there are also some challenges to using named user licences in educational settings:

• It can be difficult to manage and keep track of which users have access to which licences, especially if there is a high turnover of staff and students.
• With named user licences, institutions may need to manage software updates for each individual user, which can be time-consuming and resource intensive.
• Named user licences may make it difficult for users to access software from multiple devices or locations.

Enhancing efficiency and cost savings with Academic Software

The Academic Software platform can solve many of these challenges, offering clear benefits in terms of the management of user licences:

• Accessing named licences is made simple for your end users via the platform. Clicking the request button on the resource tile (for example Adobe Creative Cloud), automatically creates an on-the-fly user-based account in the vendor’s system or assigns the product’s licence to a user account. All this happens with just one click for the user.
• And the Academic Software platform offers a range of deployment methods for each software title, ensuring that users can get access from different devices and locations.
• Provisioning user licences via the platform is also more cost effective because it helps ensure that licence costs match real usage.  You can better keep track of licence use on an individual basis. You can also attribute licences to the appropriate LMS groups, but only pay for the licences when they are used.
• Automated deprovisioning. The platform centralises and automates the management of user licences. Time limits for licences can be automated, so a licence is automatically deprovisioned after for example three months or a year. This frees up the licence so you can reuse it for other users. 

The Academic Software platform helps ensure that the named user licence model works to give your users the licences they need, in the most automated and cost effective way for your organisation.