Licensing and entitlements#

Reportworq is licensed through the Reportworq licensing service. The License tab on the Settings > Configuration screen is where an administrator views license status and details and activates, releases, or manually activates the license. The license carries entitlements that gate which features and connectors are available, so licensing determines not just whether the product runs but which capabilities appear.

The License tab#

The License tab shows a license-status line, a license-info property list (an Information category and a Details category), and a masked key field. Unlike other Configuration tabs, it has no save state, Save stays disabled, because licensing changes happen through its own actions rather than the shared Save.

The commercial model#

A Reportworq license carries two kinds of thing: role seats for the people who sign in, and installation-level capabilities that turn features on for the whole environment. There is no limit on the number of reports you configure, and recipients, the people you distribute output to, are unlimited and free, because a recipient never signs in and holds no license. You license the people who operate Reportworq, not the reports or the audiences they reach.

Roles and seats#

Reportworq licenses three roles. Each is sold as a seat count that is either numbered or unlimited, and each is drawn from its own pool. A fourth role, Recipient, needs no license and is listed here for completeness:

Two naming changes matter when reading a license:

• The role that grants the full authoring experience now displays as Author. In earlier versions this same entitlement was labeled Reportworq Administrator. If a license note or older documentation says "Reportworq Administrator" as a user role, read it as Author.
• The User seat folds in several retired roles, Reader, Consumer, Contribution End User, and PowerPoint End User are all just a User now, and the older Reporting End User entitlement has been retired into Author.

For what each role can do, see Roles and what you can do.

Installation-level capabilities#

Beyond the role seats, the license enables capabilities for the whole installation. These are properties of the license, not of individual users:

If a counted limit is missing from the license, the default differs by lever, deliberately: Load Balancer defaults to off, while Data Connections and Workspaces default to unlimited. A feature that has to be bought is never given away by an unstamped license, and a limit on something every installation already has never cripples one.

When a feature is unavailable, check the License tab before requesting an upgrade. For example, without Contribution the Data Collection settings show a "not included in your license" lock, and Reportworq hosted AI is filtered out of the integrations catalog without the hosted-AI entitlement.

How data connections are counted#

Every configured data-source connection across all workspaces counts as one connection toward the Data Connections limit, with a single exception: the Excel file source (the Excel/CData connector) is free and does not count.

Worked example. An installation with 3 IBM Planning Analytics systems, 2 SQL Server databases, and 3 Excel file sources uses 5 counted connections. The 3 Excel files are free, even when spread across several workspaces.

How seats are counted#

• Each role, Administrator, Author, and User, draws from its own seat pool. An Administrator seat is not an Author seat, and an Author seat is not a User seat.
• An Administrator is the full-access user and can do everything an Author can, including building jobs, data models, and campaigns. Authoring as an administrator consumes an Administrator seat, not an Author seat. So one Administrator plus one Author is two seats in total, drawn from two different pools, and the Administrator is the one who can also configure the environment.
• At least one seat is required to sign in, and the instance must always keep at least one Administrator. If you remove every administrator you will lock yourself out, see the lockout-recovery note in Sign-in and SSO.

Non-production licenses#

You can request a non-production license key for development and test environments. It is fully functional, so a dev or test instance behaves exactly like production, with two deliberate differences that keep non-production output from being mistaken for the real thing:

• Reports carry a watermark.
• The user interface shows non-production notices.

Ask Reportworq for a non-production key rather than pointing a second environment at your production key. Each activation consumes an installation seat, so a shared key would draw a seat you meant to keep for production.

What happens when you go over a limit#

Going over a licensed limit never fails at the moment you cause it. You can assign one more entitlement, add one more data connection, or create one more workspace while already over. The enforcement happens later, and it is real: an overage is not a cosmetic notice on the License screen.

Sign-in is blocked while you are over the User seat count or the Workspace count. An Author or a User who is not an administrator is refused at the portal with a message naming the User or Workspace limit. Administrators are exempt, deliberately, so an administrator can always get in to disable accounts or remove a workspace and bring the installation back under its limits. The Excel add-in task pane is also exempt.

Jobs and campaigns fail to run while you are over a count or a seat limit. A Data Connections or Load Balancer overage is checked when the run is queued, and the run then fails with the reason recorded against it. Administrator and Author seat overages are checked as the run starts and fail the same way. This check is deliberately fail-open: if the licensing service cannot be reached, the job is allowed to run rather than blocked by an unrelated fault.

The API capability is a separate, immediate block. Without it, REST API commands and webhooks are refused outright, whatever your counts are.

A limit only ever enforces when the license carries a finite value and the live count exceeds it, so a license that has not been reissued does not suddenly start blocking.

Watch the counts before they bite. Because nothing fails at assignment time, the first symptom of an overage is usually a user who cannot sign in or a scheduled job that stopped running. Check the License screen when either happens.

This matters most with single sign-on. An entitlement granted through an identity-provider group only draws a license when each account first signs in, so an overage can surface gradually as users come online. To avoid it:

1. Assign entitlements at the group level rather than per account, so counts are easy to reason about.
2. Keep any OIDC-provider group that is mapped to a feature under that feature's licensed count.
3. Pre-provision accounts and reconcile against seat counts before a rollout.
4. Run periodic user and license audits.

See Accounts, groups, and entitlements for the entitlement catalog and the lever to release a seat after removing a role.

Notes and limits#

• The License tab reaches an external service, and activation consumes an installation seat, so it is not exercised casually.
• Licensing events (activation and validation) are recorded in the System audit log under the Licensing category, see Audit logs.
• Load balancing is licensed as the Load Balancer node count, enabled per license on request and verifiable on the License screen; a count of 0 means it is off, see Deployment topology.

Going deeper. For moving a license between servers, release on the old server and activate on the new one, see Migrate to a new server.