#GPPT Managing User Licenses with GP Power Tools

With the release of GP Power Tools build 26 yesterday, Microsoft Dynamics GP System Administrators now have a new tool for managing their User Licenses.

GP Power Tools build 26 adds a suite of new features specifically designed to help administrators track, analyze and control how their user licenses in Dynamics GP are used.

Why is managing User Licenses important?

The answer is simple: Cost.

Microsoft Dynamics GP user licenses (especially full licenses) are not cheap. Therefore it is important to make sure you have the number of licenses you need, but no more.

But how can you tell how many licenses you need? You could work on the number of employees you have as a start, but that does not help with employees who don’t need access or employees that need access to more than one company at a time.

To truly understand how many licenses you need, you need to answer some questions:

• Which users are logging into your Microsoft Dynamics GP system?
• When are they logging in and how much time are they logged in?
• What companies are the users logging into?
• How many times have users logged into each company?
• What are the maximum number of sessions used at one time in the system?
• What are the maximum number of sessions used at one time for a user?
• What are the maximum number of sessions used at one time for a company?
• What are the actual sessions that were logged in when the maximum occurred?

To get this information can be a lot of work, or you could install GP Power Tools and activate User Activity Tracking from the fourth “Options” tab of Administrator Settings.

Once this option is enabled, GP Power Tools will start capturing data from the User Activity on the system, tracking when users log in and log out as well as capturing data from the Automatic Logout feature. Automatic Logout will gracefully exit inactive users from Microsoft Dynamics GP to free up their licenses for other users to use. Check out the article below for more information:

• #GPPT Automatic Logout for Microsoft Dynamics GP

After the feature has been activated and you have some data captured you can review it from the User Activity Log window. The data can be reviewed on a system wide, per user, per company or per user and company basis.

It will track the number of logins for a user, the date and time of the last three logins and how long they were logged in as well as their first login date and time. It will also include information from Automatic Logout such as when it was last triggered, how many times a user cancelled the dialog warning, how many times it attempted to logout and how many times it was successfully able to logout.

While all this information is very useful, the best part is that it will also track the daily maximum number of sessions logged in at any one time on a system wide, per user and per company basis. This data is then displayed in a color coded graph which can either show a date range or display the top daily maximums in numeric order.

If you hover over any bar in the graph it will display a tooltip with the value and date that the maximum occurred. Click on the bar and the bottom pane of window will display the list of user and company sessions logged in at that time along with details of the type of session and type of client.

Note: The list of users shown in the User Activity Log Maximum Users window will not necessarily match the list of users shown in the standard User Activity window. The User Activity window shows the list of users logged in at the time the window was opened. Users could have logged in and out since the User Activity Log Maximum Users window captured a snapshot of the users logged in at the time that the maximum number of users was first reached for the day.

How to manage User Licenses

So now you know how your licenses are being used, how can you add some control to make sure the licenses are used how you planned for them to be used.

• Do you have users who log into mutliple companies and use up your available licenses?
• Do you have more than one company and users of one company hog all the licenses?
• Do you have users who log in and then just leave the session logged in without using it?

The first two issues can be controlled using the new Login Limits feature. Using the Login Limits window you can create a profile and mark it as active. This profile allows a maximum number of sessions per user to be defined for the system. Individual users can be exempted from this limit or have an alternative limit defined for them. Specific user and company combinations can be marked as always allowed which exempts them from the limits. Finally, you can specify session limits for specific companies to ensure that there are always licenses available for other companies.

If a user attempts to login and the user limit has been reached they will be presented with this dialog:

If a user attempts to login and the company limit has been reached they will be presented with this dialog:

For the third issue above, GP Power Tools adds the Automatic Timeout feature. Check out this article for more information on this feature:

• #GPPT Automatic Logout for Microsoft Dynamics GP
• #GPPT Why does Automatic Logout fail to work?
• #GPPT Why Does The Report Writer Screen Close Automatically?
• #GPPT Automatic Logout Not Identifying Activity and Logging Out

Best of all this functionality is free to all existing GP Power Tools sites with Administrator Tools. They just need to update to the latest build which can be downloaded here.

For more information see:

• GP Power Tools Portal: http://winthropdc.com/GPPT
• GP Power Tools webpage: https://www.winthropdc.com/products_GPPT.htm

Enjoy

David

23-Jan-2023: Added article explaining how to handle when Automatic Logout does not detect activity.
08-Dec-2023: Added note discussing relationship to the User Activity window.

This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.