We're on the cusp of a major update to our internal licensing systems, beginning on September 30th. This update modernizes our internal systems and makes it easier for us to make future updates.
What to Expect During the Transition
For the first two weeks of October, we'll be migrating data from old systems to new, and we'll have a subset of our major licensing functionality available. You'll still be able to create new trials and new monthly accounts, but license updates and activation won't be possible. All products and features will continue to work during the transition.
Post-transition Behavior Updates
Individual user account updates
- Trials will no longer be removed when term licenses are applied. All trials in different product lines than the new term license’s product will remain active.
- If the term license is for the same product line as the trial license, the trial license’s expiry date will be adjusted to end the day before the start date of the term license. This will ensure continuous coverage between the licenses without overlap, which would cause feature and usage conflicts if allowed.
- If the term license is for the same product line as the trial license, the trial license’s expiry date will be adjusted to end the day before the start date of the term license. This will ensure continuous coverage between the licenses without overlap, which would cause feature and usage conflicts if allowed.
- Licenses will no longer have the option to be extended when duplicate term licenses are applied. Users will no longer be able to choose to co-term or extend a license when they apply a license of the same type as a license that’s in effect during an overlapping time period on the same tenant. The licenses will (always) be co-termed, with no change to start and end dates from the order contract.
Example: The customer has a CIXA license applied, with a start date of Apr-1-2023 and end date of Apr-1-2024. They apply a second license for CIXA that starts on May-1-2023 and ends on May-1-2024.- Old experience: The UI would ask if they want to extend their current CIXA license or co-term the licenses. If the user chooses to extend the license, the end date of the second license gets adjusted.
- New experience: The UI will NOT ask any questions and will co-term the licenses, using the original start and end dates for both licenses and not adjusting the dates.
Partner Updates
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Term to MSP is now Self-service. Previous to launch, customers had to reach out to Sophos for help making a term licensed account a monthly account. Post-launch, MSP-enabled partners will be able to convert term licensed accounts to monthly subscription accounts themselves.
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Steps: Customers (tab) > click on term licensed account > Change licenses > follow wizard to select products and apply changes. Changes are applied immediately, with the partner agreeing to immediate billing on behalf of their customer.
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A partner ALWAYS sees a message telling them that unused license time will be forfeit and the monthly billing will begin immediately.
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Tenants with licenses that expire >3 months from today will receive an additional message confirming which licenses have >90 days remaining in their term.
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Partners will be able to select Phish Threat (or not). Prior to this update, new trials and accounts would always receive licenses for Phish Threat. Post-launch, partners will be able to see and deselect Phish Threat when creating new trials and monthly accounts, and changing monthly licenses.
Enterprise Account Updates
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The Delete Sub-estate option has been removed. The delete sub-estate option has nearly identical functionality to unlink sub-estate (which is confusing and duplicative), so we removed the Delete option, which is much harder to reverse.
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Users who want to reuse the email address on file for the sub-estate should add a different email address to the account and remove the old one, or contact us to do so.
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We will take feedback into consideration if we get strong user demand for this feature.
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Automatic license allocation is ending. Prior to October, when a master license was applied to an enterprise account, “Automatic” or “Default” license allocation gave all sub-estates under the enterprise access to the license. Going forward, this will not happen automatically and enterprises will need to explicitly set the number of licenses allocated to each sub-estate.
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New sub-estates will no longer have licenses automatically allocated when licenses are applied to master licensed accounts. Enterprises will need to go to the license allocation modal and choose the number of licenses to allocate to each sub-estate. In the past, new sub-estates would have had shared access to the licenses automatically.
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- Trial behavior is changing. Newly created sub-estates will now receive 30 day trials of our software products, just like trials created from sophos.com. However, In-Product-Trials, normally activated from a "Free Trials" page for existing sub-estates, will no longer be available.