We don't often talk about our website, remobjects.com, here on this blog, but next to our actual products, it is of course a crucial part of the user experience for you, our customers.

Today I want to highlight a bunch of enhancements we have made to our customer portal over the past few weeks to make it easier for users with multi-developer teams and/or site licenses to manage their accounts and licenses.

The first part of this is sub-users. The concept of sub-users on our website has been around for a while, but has been mainly managed manually and upon request; with the recent changes, it becomes easier for you to view and manage sub-users yourself.

What are sub-users? Essentially, for teams with more than one developer (e.g. usually "a company"), individual user accounts on remobjects.com can be grouped under a shared "parent user".

We've created a new Your Sub-Users section on the portal that will automatically become available if you (a) own any site licenses, (b) own any multi-user licenses, or (c) already have one or more sub-user set up.

(If you do not see this section in the portal menu, but would like to leverage sub-users, drop us a mail. It could be that, depending on how your licenses are currently spread across accounts not yet linked to yours, the website does not recognize your account as applicable).

In the Your Sub-Users section you can perform a variety of administrative tasks, including:

  • Seeing a list of all your current sub-users
  • Disabling or re-enabling sub-users (for example if people leave the company)
  • Creating new sub-users
  • Seeing all the licenses associated with your sub-users
  • Moving individual (non-site) licenses between your account and that of a sub-user

Purchasing Additional Licenses or Renewals

If your account has one or more sub-user set up, it is now also easier to buy new licenses for a sub-user, or to renew existing licenses in a sub-user's account.

When you get to the checkout in our online shop, you will be presented with a new page after logging in, where you can (optionally) select to purchase the new license(s) for a sub-user's account instead of your own. The purchase will be made as it always has, and the order will be associated with your own account, but the new or renewed license(s) will be added to the selected user instead.

(To order or renew licenses for multiple users in one go, and take advantage of the volume discounts applied by the online shop, you can of course still order the group of licenses for yourself, and later distribute them among the applicable sub-users manually.)

Site Licenses

Site licenses are a convenient way to cover your whole team or company with access to a product – and save some money in the process. If you own any site licenses, these licenses will now be automatically available to all your sub-users, with no action required.

Users can log in with their own account on the website, and will have access to product downloads, including latest releases and previews for any site license in their own account or their parent user's account.

The same goes for license file downloads within our products, such as from the Fire or Water IDEs, in Delphi, Visual Studio or tools like Schema Modeler and Service Builder. When the tools refresh the license files, they will automatically get any site licenses you are covered with from a parent user, as well.

We recommend that all site licensees adopt sub-users, instead of sharing a single login with all developers who will use the products. This gives you more control over who has access to (and uses) the products, and also protects your main account from being fiddled with by any random employee.

Let us know what you think!

We hope these changes make it easier for multi-user teams, from the small to the very large, to maintain users and licenses. Let us know how you like the new changes, or if you think of anything else we can improve to make this experience better!

Yours,
marc