attn: Customer Service Department. I need answers to complex licensing questions

[Megan Moore]

Hi Atlassian,

I work at CompassLearning in Austin, TX, where we currently use Confluence for our internal wiki. We have a license for 500 users. I am the new Technical Writer at the company and I'm pushing for us to switch our technical docs (user help) over to a Confluence wiki as well. However, I think we may need a totally separate installation of Confluence (that is, a separate server) as we market educational software to many schools and districts across the company. Each school (or district) includes Administrator, Teacher, and Student accounts. All of these users will need access to our user help. As a result, there's no way to accurately predict how many end users we would have for our online end-user help on any given day. Therefore I'm not sure what type/size of new license my company would have to purchase from Atlassian in order to support our user help with Confluence.

I appreciate the width and breadth of your online user communities and documentation, but I really feel that I need to speak directly with a sales representative or customer advocate in order to discuss our unique needs. I'm not able to find the answers I need within your user documentation or support communities. Can someone from Atlassian contact me directly?

[Selcuk Savas]

Hi Megan,

First I am not working for Atlassian but I beleive I can create some more questions for you to consider.

I think you don't need another installation. You can create a space for it. But it is up to you.

The critical mass is 10.000.

Some questions for you:

• How many schools do you serve? (simply 1 school = 1 admin and at least 10-15 teachers)
• Do you plan to give access to all students in the district/area/school? (simple 1 school = 200 students)
• Do you plan to give opportunity to sign in? Doeas anyone can create an account on the system?
• Do user help docs need to be password protected? Can they live on a regular website? (ie. open for everyone, no licencing issues)

if you have 10 schools and plan to give access to everyone you can easily exceed 2000 users. With this simple math if you have 50+ schools you will need 10000+ licence.

As you can see it is more than a licencing issue, what is you company's business plan for next 2 years?

Do you have enough resources to manage this much user and traffic and data and document?

So, do you serve 10000+ people or potentially will you serve them?

Alternative 1 - I don't care/I am time poor/We have enough budget/I don't know

To be on the safe side get 10000+ licence.

10000+ user licence is $4000 more then 2001-10000 licence.

Alternative 2 - Let's release phase by phase

Go with 2001-10000 licence and when you need more get more licence.

Alternatively 3 - Plan Test Evaluate Act,

You can do pilot run for a school (evangelist with your product) within you licence limit and gather information of the usage of this pilot space and model for a bigger scale to determine what exactly do you need licence and resource wise.

I hope I created some points to consider for you.

Cheers,

Selcuk