Disabling Customers

This functionality allows you to easily control end user's access to your software in the field. Disabling the end user's seats or access can be done at either the "Customer" level, where disabling propagates to all entitlements, or at the entitlement level, where it can be targeted to specific sets of entitlements and associated activation codes.

At the entitlement level, it's ideal for a single customer, or group of customers, or a single instance of a Local License server at a site vs switching off everything on a particular customer.

This is very useful for end users who are delinquent or refuse to pay for their license or any other reason you need to block access to your software.

The way this works is your software should be set to query the Zentitle servers at set intervals (per the API and setup) along with your own programming - see best practices below - and any entitlements disabled in the Zentitle system will block access at that refresh point. This means if you have a very long refresh period, licenses will continue to function until they either refresh based on your programming (e.g., API call to Zentitle on startup) or they call back to Zentitle based on the "lease period" set at the product level.

You can now “switch off” all entitlements for the customer with one click.

Disabling a Customer

Search for your customer or find them on the list in the customer section.

Click the "Disable Customer" red button in the top right-hand corner of the customer page.

Click "yes" to disable the customer. Disabling the customer will also disable all of their entitlements. You can disable and re-enable the customer without losing any entitlements.

Once successfully disabled, you can check its status on the Customer page.

As you can see above, the button in the top right has changed color and is set to "Enable Customer," ready for you to reverse the process when required.

The Customer "disabled" status can also be seen in the list of all your Customers.

To check that this process also disabled the entitlements, you can quickly use the entitlement button on the customer page to check their status.

As you can see here on the list of entitlements above, they are all now disabled.

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Re-enable a disabled customer.

Search for or select the customer from the list in the Zentitle UI found on the left-hand navigation.

Click "Enable customer" in the top right-hand corner. Re-enabling a customer will allow activation again.

Click the "Yes" button that shows up in the dialog box.

The disable button will show again now.

The customer and all its entitlements are fully activated, and the activation codes attached will function again.

The status of these entitlements will also display to the end user via the end user portal if you are using that option for your users so they can also see what entitlement is disabled (and pay any delinquent license fee).

Note: All the entitlements for this customer will be disabled simultaneously when using this process. If you only want to disable some, not all, of the rights of the customer, use the "disable entitlement" option instead.

For entitlements to be disabled in the field, the best practice is to set your software to call back to Zentitle once a day and refresh the license on the application start or run. This way, when a license/entitlement/activation code is checked against its rights at Zentitle, it will show as disabled. Then (assuming you set up your code this way), it will prevent access to your software until you re-enable the entitlement.

See also "Disabling Entitlements".

Using API calls to disable Customers:

https://api.zentitle.io/docs/#tag/Customers/operation/Customers_Disable