How to manage overlapping Licenses?

[michel]

Hello everyone.

My company is providing consulting services to a parent company.

This parent company has several business units. Currently each of these BUs have their own Confluence licensing. 

We want to set up the site for the Parent company, who ultimately takes care of all of the BUs licenses, without overlapping licenses. 

Is there a best practices of how to manage this? We just need to figure out what is the hierarchy site / places  (groups/permissions)? 

And at the end, also not get charged twice.

Can anyone help? 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

There is no "overlapping licencing" here.  Each individual system has a licence that allows up to X users to be enabled in it.

It does not matter if one person needs an account in three of the systems, each system needs a licence for that person, so three "seats" will be consumed.

If you are a very large site, with thousands of users and a lot of different sites, it may be worth looking at "enterprise" licences which obviate that, but you really do need to be large before it becomes worth it.

[michel]

Hi Nic,

Thank you for your response.

What is large? 

Currently, I am looking at this scenario with a client. What is the best architecture, if I am using cloud? 

Is is possible to manage the whole thing with one site and groups to manage the business units? 

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You cannot set that up.  You either need a string of separate Cloud sites on one level, or a single site with the business units working in silo-ed projects and spaces.

If you go for the first, you will need to licence each user for each BU they need to get into, either with the same domain accounts or different ones.  But you'll find it expensive unless you have thousands of users.

If you got for the second, you will need to merge all your domains, but your people will all have access to a single system, so your licence problem vanishes.

[michel]

This gives me guidance for my next steps. 

But before I make a decision I need to gather some information.

Thank you Nic.