Disabling Entitlements

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” entitlements with one click.

Disabling an entitlement

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

Click the "Disable Entitlement" red button on the top right of the entitlement page.

Click the "Yes" button that shows up in the dialog box. Disabling this entitlement will revoke access to it. You can re-enable it at any time.

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

As you can see above, the status is set to "disabled" with a red icon, and the button in the top right has changed color and is set to "Enable entitlement," ready for you to reverse the process when required.

The entitlement "disabled" status can also be seen in the list of all your entitlements.

---

Re-enable a disabled entitlement.

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

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

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

The status will now show as "created" where it was before it was changed. The red disable button shows again for any future changes.

The entitlement is now fully activated again, 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: Entitlements can be disabled independently of the customer being disabled, which means that you can disable one or the other, but the entitlement will remain disabled if you set it here, even if the customer is re-enabled, etc., i.e., if you disable an entitlement, you have to re-enable it directly not via the customer process.

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 Customers".

Using API calls to disable entitlements:

https://api.zentitle.io/docs/#tag/General-entitlement-operations/operation/Entitlements_Disable