CustomerGate Licence in CustomerGate 365

Requesting and entering a key

A key is a long text that starts with CG365-1. It is for one production environment of one tenant, for a plan and until an end date.

1. Open CustomerGate Licence: search for it, or choose Licence on CustomerGate Setup.
2. Choose Request a Licence Key. You see the Tenant ID, the Environment Name and the company. Send those to Van Oosten Software.
3. Paste the key you get back into the Licence Key field. Spaces and line breaks from an e-mail do not matter.
4. The key is checked before it is saved: it must be issued by Van Oosten Software, for exactly this tenant and this environment name. If something does not match, the message says what.

A sandbox needs no licence, and neither does a company in demo mode. So do not enter a key in a sandbox.

The three plans

The plan decides which web services answer. What Business Central itself does is the same in every plan.

The status

The Status field at the top says where things stand today in this company, and Explanation says in one sentence what that means for the website. Web Services Stop On names the day it stops if nothing changes.

Not Required

A sandbox. Everything works, without a key.

Demo Mode

Demo mode is on in this company. Everything works without a key, because in demo mode no customer receives a message.

Trial

There is no key yet. Everything works, with every function, until thirty days after CustomerGate first ran in this environment.

Active

A valid key. Everything in your plan works.

Expiring Soon

The key ends within thirty days. Ask for a new one; nothing changes yet.

Grace Period

The key ended less than thirty days ago. Everything still works until the date on the page.

Environment Changed

The key is for another environment name: the environment was renamed or copied. Everything works for thirty more days; ask for a key for the new name.

Lapsed

None of the above. The CustomerGate web services are stopped.

Company Not Covered

The key covers one company, and this is another one. The web services are stopped in this company.

What stops, and what never stops

Without a valid licence only the doors to the outside stop. The website notices the same day; inside sales can simply keep working.

• Stops: every CustomerGate web service except voaPing and SignOut; signing out always keeps working. The website no longer takes requests, the portal and the catalog do not answer, and no webhooks go out. The website gets the message [VOA-LicenceRequired], and voaPing says why and since when. The three iFacto pages the app publishes, voaProfiles, voaGrades and voaItemTypes, do not check the licence either.
• Never stops: every screen in Business Central, the worklist, the mail job, the cleanup after the retention period, and Erase Personal Data and Export Personal Data. Your customers' data is never held hostage.
• A function that is not in your plan, such as the portal on Requests, answers [VOA-NotInPlan]. That is not an outage, and it stays that way until the plan changes.

Several companies

Requests and Portal cover one company in the environment, Complete every company. When you enter a key for one company, it goes to the company you are working in. Licensed Companies at the bottom of the page shows which one that is.

• Choose Use Licence in This Company to give the licence to the company you are working in now. If the place is taken, first take the other company off with Remove from Licence.
• Renaming a company is no problem: the licence remembers the company by its ID, not by its name.
• A test company in the same production environment needs no licence: turn on demo mode there.

A renamed or copied environment

A key is issued for an environment name. If somebody changes that name in the admin center, or a copy of the production environment appears, the key no longer fits there. The status then becomes Environment Changed, and the web services keep working for thirty days. In that time, ask for a key for the name under This Environment.

Where else you see the licence

• CustomerGate Setup shows a line at the top while the licence needs attention: a trial that is running, an end date that is near, or web services that are stopped. Choose the status to open this page.
• The role center warns inside sales in the last two weeks before the web services stop, and while they are stopped: they are the first to notice that requests stop arriving.
• Diagnostics has a Licence section, with Fix leading to this page.
• Webhook Subscriptions says so when your plan does not include webhooks.

Steel 365

The Steel 365 module belongs to Complete. If Steel 365 is installed in an environment with another plan, this page says so, and so does Diagnostics. The module keeps working: it decides what the quantities on a line mean, and those do not switch on a licence. It is something for a conversation about your subscription.