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jtkat
jtkat
Participant
July 30, 2015
Answered

Managing licenses for temporary contractors/consultants

  • July 30, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 371 views

My company is trying to decide whether or not to invest in Captivate as our primary authoring tool (as opposed to using our proprietary scenario/presentation builder).  As the Lead ID, I am all for this transition and love using Captivate from a design perspective.  We often use contracted Instructional Designers for our short term projects, and I want to know how we could best manage multiple subscriptions for these individuals.

How does the subscription work from a management standpoint?  Would we simply create multiple Adobe IDs managed by myself?  Does management of these IDs allow me to activate licenses on different devices?

Any advice in this arena would be very helpful.  Thank you.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Erik Lord

I don't know of any way to 'inactivate' a license on a target machine you don't have direct access to.

Plus, once installed, the subscription is actually part of the user-account login.

So you could, I guess, have an email/Adobe account like 'contractor1@mycompany.net'...and tell the contractor to register their installation with that account...but then, it's up to the contractor to sign-out and de-register their CP install when the contact is complete.

If you have trustworthy contactors who will reliably do that, that may be a solution.

If it's random folks and you have any concern about them continuing to use the login/subscription after the contract is done, then I wouldn't do that.

I'm not terribly familiar with the 'team' features though, so maybe there is a way to manage subaccounts...

However, the *better* solution may be to just put the entire software responsibility on the contractor themselves.

They can subscribe to Captivate on a monthly basis ($30/month):

Buying guide | Adobe Captivate 8

So if they don't already have Captivate, tell them to subscribe to it and include the cost in their monthly invoice... fold it into the price of contracting (what's $30 a month in that sense? maybe a half hour to hour of contactor's rate?).

The only caveat I'd add to that is, I don't know how easy it is to *cancel* a subscription. Some folks had it easy, some folks not. So you may want to check on that process, and be sure your contractors are clear on it...as once the contract ends, you're not going to pay for their monthly subscription anymore

1 reply

Erik Lord
Erik LordCorrect answer
Inspiring
July 31, 2015

I don't know of any way to 'inactivate' a license on a target machine you don't have direct access to.

Plus, once installed, the subscription is actually part of the user-account login.

So you could, I guess, have an email/Adobe account like 'contractor1@mycompany.net'...and tell the contractor to register their installation with that account...but then, it's up to the contractor to sign-out and de-register their CP install when the contact is complete.

If you have trustworthy contactors who will reliably do that, that may be a solution.

If it's random folks and you have any concern about them continuing to use the login/subscription after the contract is done, then I wouldn't do that.

I'm not terribly familiar with the 'team' features though, so maybe there is a way to manage subaccounts...

However, the *better* solution may be to just put the entire software responsibility on the contractor themselves.

They can subscribe to Captivate on a monthly basis ($30/month):

Buying guide | Adobe Captivate 8

So if they don't already have Captivate, tell them to subscribe to it and include the cost in their monthly invoice... fold it into the price of contracting (what's $30 a month in that sense? maybe a half hour to hour of contactor's rate?).

The only caveat I'd add to that is, I don't know how easy it is to *cancel* a subscription. Some folks had it easy, some folks not. So you may want to check on that process, and be sure your contractors are clear on it...as once the contract ends, you're not going to pay for their monthly subscription anymore

jtkat
jtkatAuthor
Participant
July 31, 2015

I think both of these solutions are great suggestions! The second one is probably better, not because I don't trust in our contractors, but just because I know it would be easier to manage from our end.  I'll look into deactivation and set up some instructions to empower our folks from end to end.  Thanks!

RodWard
Community Expert
RodWardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 1, 2015

I'm a professional contract elearning developer who works for different companies.  In my experience most of these companies want me to use one of THEIR PCs or laptops that is already loaded with Captivate.  This way they get to keep the software under their own control.

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