If your company has many licenses of Revu it can be difficult managing them, especially when a major update is released. Luckily, Bluebeam has a solution to simplify end user license management called ‘Enterprise Licensing,’ which is an add-on subscription.

All too often a company will purchase a few licenses of Revu at a time and not realize that a new serial number is created for each new purchase. If that company also purchases annual maintenance, which entitles them to upgrade their licenses when a new version of Revu comes out, the renewal date will be set to the purchase date. Eventually, if that company continues acquiring licenses over the years, they will have many different ‘pools’ of licenses associated with different serial numbers, all with their own annual maintenance subscription renewal date. When a new version of Revu comes out, if that company chooses to upgrade their licenses, they will be given a new serial number for each upgraded pool of licenses. Often, users will upgrade the license on their devices themselves, and forget to unregister the older version. Since Bluebeam keeps track of licenses, it will appear as though the company is now ‘over-installed,’ or has more licenses than they purchased. On top of all of that, the company will receive a separate invoice for each annual maintenance renewal date, will leave licenses registered to devices that leave their domain, and will purchase new licenses because they think all of their licenses are in use, when many are being used twice on the same machine or are on a lost device. Enterprise licensing alleviates these scenarios.

The requirements to have enterprise licensing, and the subscription itself accomplish a number of things: First, all licenses must be consolidated to a single serial number, per edition (one for serial number for Standard, one for CAD and one for eXtreme). This requirement, in itself, will save your company a lot of time, since unconsolidated licenses can get tangled up or even lost. Second, all licenses must have an annual maintenance subscription, which will have one renewal date since it’ll be added to a pool of consolidated licenses. Then, the enterprise license subscription grants your company access to an online portal to manage your pool of licenses. Here is how the portal looks when you first log in, if you have multiple accounts, they will show up here:

After selecting an account, you will be able to see what license serial numbers are associated with that account. In this case, I have two pools of open licenses (the open license and enterprise license portals are the same).

Selecting a serial number will navigate to a summary page. It will display the serial number, product key and annual maintenance (and enterprise licensing) renewal date.

Below the summarized information is a usage report. You can view different date ranges to see how your licenses are being used, and you can even download user usage data.

Further down you can view the devices associated with this pool of licenses. This section is divided into three categories: active, registered, and revoked. The active category displays all devices currently using a license.

The registered category shows all devices that have registered Revu with this serial number.

The revoked category shows all devices that have had this license serial number revoked.

From this section you can easily revoke and reinstate access to your pool of licenses, either by selecting on a registered device and selecting ‘revoke selected…’

…Or selecting ‘cancel revoke’ in the revoke status of a device.

Besides license management, enterprise licensing allows for a 5% overage of allowed versus installed licenses and will automatically revoke a license if a user doesn’t use Revu for more than 15 days, which prevents licenses getting stuck on lost or missing devices.

A common misconception is that the enterprise license portal will allow you to manage licenses that are already tangled, which is not possible. When you purchase an enterprise licensing subscription, you are essentially given new licenses and must unregister all other licenses before you can administer the new ones. Another misconception is that you can register devices from the portal; in order to grant or revoke licenses to a device, that device must first be registered manually. Although getting through the prerequisites can be a hassle, once your company has enterprise licensing, managing licenses will no longer be an issue and upgrading to a new version will no longer require users to unregister older versions, since they will be revoked after 15 days.

Enterprise licensing costs $10 per license per year.

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