What is a License Partition?

A License Partition is an allocation or group of printer licenses (sometimes called seats). Here's some basic information about License Partitions:

• a license has a single partition by default
• can break up the license into as many or as few partitions as you wish
• work in combination with Printer Pools to control license usage

A License Partition cannot

• give you more printer seats than you're licensed to have
• total more printer seats than your license
• control user access to printers (this is done in Printer Groups)
• control user access to printer seats (this is done with Printer Pools)

Where are partitions located?

To see your partitions, please do the following

1. Open the Administration Console on a computer that has permissions manage the license.
2. Open the Licensing tree on the left-hand menu, if it's not open
3. Click License Setup
4. Locate the name of your license host on the list, if there's more than one.
5. Click on the license host name to open the license information.
6. Click on the section labeled license Partitions.

Why use License Partitions?

License Partitions, when used in combination with Printer Pools, are used to control license and printer usage. Partitions and Pools work hand in hand to control license usage to help prevent exceeding your printer count and violating your license by limiting who can use what portion of the license.

Printer partitions can also be used to allocate printers to different divisions. For example, you can allocate a set of printers to the QA department while the warehouse has a different set of allocated printers. Each department is only allowed to use their printers and cannot use each other's. A combination of License Partitions, Printer Pools, and User Access Controls makes this possible.

The License Partition dialog

This dialog will tell you some useful information about how your License is setup as well as where you can name your license. For this example, I'll be using a large 100 printer license. Here's a screenshot of my License Partition information and a description of each section:

License Statistics

This section will tell you some basic license statistics:

• Full support number (used by Technical Support)
• Current version and edition
• Activation date and when the maintenance agreement ends with us
• Any license violations (listed as Status)
• Printer usage
• Unallocated printer counts (hidden if 0)

Unallocated printer counts

Unallocated printer counts are printer seats that have not been assigned to a partition. Seats may become unallocated if their Partition is deleted or if the Partition returns seats to the unallocated count.

Here is an example of the dialog with unallocated printers:

Unallocated printers are listed in red font and marked on the Partitions bar as gray.

License Partitions

At the bottom of the License Partition dialog, there are two collapsed sections, the first of which is License Partitions. When expanding this section, you can see all your current partitions as well as add or remove any partitions.

For this example, I have my license broken up into four partitions, but only three are being used. The fourth one is simply an empty partition that does nothing. In this screenshot, all 100 printer seats are allocated for use with no unallocated seats left in limbo:

This section also lists the allocations, printer statistics specific to each Partition, and its paired Printer Pool.  Here you also have the tools to modify, delete, and create new Partitions. The name of each Partition comes from the paired Printer Pool's name.

User Access Control

At the bottom of the License Partition section is the User Access Control. This is a global control of who can connect to and use the license as a whole, not just who can use a particular partition. If you wish to control access to a particular partition, it must be set in the paired Printer Pool instead.

By default, Everyone is allowed to use the entire license.

For more information on how to work with User Access Controls, please see Controlling User Access in the Administration Console