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Summary of Changes
Action Required by Administrators
Bentley Systems recently announced that SELECTserver is entering a sunsetting phase. As part of that process, SELECTserver will no longer be used for license activation and usage posting functions. However, SELECTserver-licensed product versions can still be activated. Those requests from existing SELECTserver-licensed software versions will now be fulfilled by the Subscription Entitlement Service (SES).
Configurations on end-user machines will not need to change for this transition. The same server name and activation keys will continue to work.
Also, beginning April 23, 2021, the SELECTserver administration interface will no longer be available. However, you can continue to activate SELECTserver-licensed applications, and you can administer those licenses through Entitlement Management and the Subscription Analytics interfaces of SES.
As you transition from license administration in SELECTserver to SES, you’ll find that most functionality is supported, but in a slightly different way. This guide will help you understand the differences and how to complete common tasks within the SES Entitlement Management interface. It will also walk you through the actions your organization administrator needs to take to migrate any settings related to product restrictions on Custom Activation Groups or Temporary keys or settings on Checkout Restrictions.
One fundamental difference in license management within SES is that licenses are no longer provided at a site level with activation keys as they were in SELECTserver. In SES, product entitlements provided by one or more contracts signed by your organization are associated to the country for which the contract is active. Organizations with contracts signed in different countries may have a different list of entitlements per country. As the sites and their license in SELECTserver were also derived from contracts in particular countries, you will see that all of the site licenses from SELECTserver have been rolled up into that entitlement country in SES.
Rather than distributing activation keys which were convenient but inherently less secure, users are provided entitlements based on their association to the organization with our Identity Management System (IMS) and their entitlement country on their IMS profile. Users signing in through IMS to our portals or through the CONNECTION Client will have access to the entitlements for their entitlement country.
Site activation keys are still the mode of activation for SELECTserver-based product versions. To allow SES to service those requests for activation and usage logging, site keys will be mapped within SES to their corresponding entitlement country. As the entitlement country will have entitlements to the product licenses that were available to the sites, there should be no disruption in users’ ability to activate through existing site activation keys.
To see the mappings of site activation keys to country, please visit Subscription Entitlement Service - Activation Key Mappings.
Within Entitlement Management, license administrators can control users’ access to specific products under each entitlement country. The administrator might, as an example, deny access to more expensive product licenses except to a select few users. Users of SES-licensed product versions would not be able to activate those products unless they were one of the users configured to allow access.
As the mapped site activation keys will be deriving their entitlements from the entitlement country, the same access configuration will apply to activation requests based on the key. They will give administrators the ability to control the list of products that the key is allowed to activate. If every user is denied access to a product in that entitlement country, then the site activation key is also denied access. That access control can also be overridden for specific activation keys if the administrator wants to allow a single key to have access. Please read the section on using Entitlement Groups to learn more.
Custom activation groups in SELECTserver allowed a license administrator to provide users with an activation key that would only activate certain products configured by the administrator. This functionality is already available for SES-licensed product versions through the use of general access settings in an entitlement country and the administration of overrides for specific users or entitlement groups.
To continue to use a custom activation group key to only allow activation of specific products, the key should be mapped to an entitlement group in which the administrator has defined the set of products that group can activate. Users of SES-license product versions that are associated to that group will have access to all the product entitlements defined in that group. The same is true for usage through activation keys mapped to that group. Through the entitlement group, license administrators will be able to create, update, or delete custom activation keys.
Please see Managing SELECTserver Activation Keys in SES to learn how to use entitlement groups to manage your custom or temporary keys.
Custom activation groups previously allowed administrators to organize usage reports based on the key that the usage was reported against. Allocation groups replace that functionality within SES.
An entitlement group and an allocation group may be the same group or they can be different groups. This gives administrators the flexibility to separate the two, if necessary, but maintain the ease of having one group that fulfills both functions if that works best for the organization. Please see Allocation Group Mappings to learn how to manage reporting through allocation groups
Temporary keys in SELECTserver previously allowed a license administrator to control the list of products that the key could activate, and to set a date for the key to expire. Entitlement groups replace the functionality of temporary keys. Custom s that are mapped to an entitlement group, can have an optional end date after which the key can no longer be used to activate any product.
Please see Managing SELECTserver Activation Keys in SES to learn how to use Entitlement groups to manage your custom or temporary keys
Administrators can generate checked out license files for SELECTserver-licensed or SES-licensed product versions from within Entitlement Management. Existing checkouts in SELECTserver will also be migrated over to SES, so all checkouts can be managed together.
Please see License Checkouts for more information about checking out licenses for offline use in Entitlement Management.
Checkout restrictions in SES are managed and work similarly to how they work in SELECTserver. However, where it was possible to set up checkout restrictions for each site in SELECTserver, SES, checkout restrictions are set up per entitlement country.
Please see Checkout Restrictions for more information about configuring checkout restrictions in entitlement management.
Because sites will be rolled into one entitlement country in SES, Bentley cannot automatically migrate checkout restrictions. License administrators will need to define the best set of checkout restrictions by each entitlement country.
Settings for client access restrictions in SELECTserver cannot be migrated to SES. There is no comparable support for this function in SES.
If you continue to use non-current software versions which are licensed through SELECTserver technologies, you may incur a quarterly fee. To track your daily usage per machine to determine if you will incur SELECTserver fees, use the Daily Usage by Machine report in the Analytics Portal.
Access the Daily Usage by Machine report here: https://reporting.bentley.com/report/appusagebyday
Bentley is making every effort to make this transition as easy as possible including migration of license configurations from SELECTserver to SES. However, because of some of the differences between the two systems noted above, not every setting can be automatically migrated. Some settings, specifically product restrictions on Custom Activation Groups and Temporary keys and Checkout restrictions, will require manual intervention by license administrators to set up and configure in SES.
Existing site activation keys, including custom activation groups and temporary keys, will automatically be migrated to SES and mapped to their corresponding entitlement country. However, Bentley cannot generate entitlement groups or allocation groups and the product restrictions to reflect existing custom activation groups and temporary keys.
Because these restrictions cannot be migrated over from SELECTserver automatically, administrators will need to create entitlement groups and manually configure the product restriction lists to match the restrictions that were configured for the activation keys in SELECTserver.
To configure the products available to an activation key after the switch to SES, the basic steps necessary are:
Please see Managing SELECTserver Activation Keys in SES to learn more details about how to use Entitlement groups to manage your custom or temporary keys
In SELECTserver, sites may have their own defined checkout restrictions. Because those sites will be rolled up into one entitlement country in SES, Bentley cannot automatically migrate checkout restrictions. License administrators will need to define checkout restrictions by each entitlement country to match, as closely as possible, the checkout restrictions defined in SELECTserver Checkout restrictions for the Activation keys mapped to that country. This will require some judgement by the organization license administrator to decide which products should be allowed for checkout by the associated Activation keys.
Please see Checkout Restrictions for more details about how to set up these restrictions in SES.
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