Actually, 'Only allow read-only access' only needs to be checked for accounts logging in through the Public Portal (unlicensed) connections. Any account with a named user license allocated to it (full or retrieval) can always connect through WebLink regardless of the state of that checkbox.

I understand that, but for a user who uses WebLink on a daily basis, and only occasionally needs to go to a designated workstation (that has a Named Device license) to do work say, in LaserFiche Client, twice a year, then this can't work.

A user who *never* uses WebLink can do that as 'Only allow read-only access'  is *not* checked for his account. Nor does he/she have a Named User license.

But the user who *does* use WebLink, cannot use this workstation as it will not allow him/her to acquire a read/write license as the Named Device licence is intended to. That's where this checkbox breaks things.

And it is why I'm asking : is the check box really necessary and can it be simply removed ? It's kind of obvious that a user logging in to WebLink will only be given a Retrieval (public portal) license. I don't see the need for the check box.

Thanks

The confusion here is basically one of license policy. The premise of a named device is that the licensing model allows allocating to the machine instead of the user if the user only ever logs in through that machine. Once that user is logging in through another system/machine (WebLink in this case), that's no longer the case and they will need their own named license. They could of course log into Public Portal as a public user, it's just authenticated directory users from multiple machines are going to require their own named user license allocation.

Since this sounds like a license policy question at this point, I'd recommend talking to your reseller or account manager who would be better able to address your specific scenario.

Hi Justin,

I have a similar usage case for a secondary education college.

They have 400+  students who infrequently would download documents via Weblink. Each student is only permitted to see their own documents so a LF user account and password must be entered as Weblink login.  The students are not stored in AD or an LDAP source.

There are about 25 teachers and admin staff who will be Named Users who will add documents to the LF repository for the 400+ students to access by Weblink portal only.

We are proposing to use LF Portal license for the students (not Named or Read Only) and 25 Full named users for the teachers.

Can this work?

Do we need unlimited portal license?

Is there a better way to license this scenario?

What is the easiest way to create the student accounts in LF?

Many thanks for your help on this.

Hi Warren,

Sorry about the delay in response, I've been on vacation since you posted this.

So long as the students never need to modify anything, there should be no major issues here - so long as they are logging into WebLink through an account flagged as read-only, they will use portal licensing and do not need to have their own named licenses. Since the students are a) not stored in AD or LDAP and b) the students need to have a specific account to see their own documents, you'll need to generate Laserfiche username and password accounts for each of them on the repository. There are ways to automate this in some fashions, but it will need to be handled. There are no licensing issues beyond that though (again, so long as you flag those accounts as read-only or put them all in a group flagged as read-only), you just need to create the accounts themselves and set up the security for them. 

You can copy/paste or export/import user definitions through the Laserfiche Administration Console. My suggestion would be to create a standard user account and export it. That will give you an xml file where you can then clone them and enter the specific information and then import that back into the administration console. It's still going to be a bit of a pain, but it's easier then going through the UI one by one. Since there's nothing to lookup against though, there's really not much else to do. You can use Workflow to set up secured folders corresponding to each of these users automatically, so you shouldn't need to do that manually (actually, you might be able to also do the user creation in workflow as well, but that might require WF scripting).

Whether or not you need an unlimited portal license has to do entirely with how many people will be accessing WebLink at any given time, not the number of users. If you think only 10 users will need to access WebLink at any time, then you can use a 10 user portal license. If an 11th tries to access though, they will be unable to. So that one just comes down to your expected concurrent load. Since it's 'infrequent', you probably don't need unlimited, unless it's always going to be every student at the same time.

Again, sorry for the delay in response, hope this is still helpful.