You may notice when you examine the ISV licenses installed in your system (under System Administration menu>Setup>Licenses>License codes), that the user count field value shown for the Farsight Demand Forecasting ISV license (DemandForecastingFSL) is a very large number, in the order of hundreds of millions, or even billions.
When you see this, don't panic. It is normal. This value is large by design and is correct for your current license. And we do not use that number/value for billing or any other purposes other than as part of how we license and verify the licensing of Demand Forecasting users within Farsight Demand Forecasting.
If you have any other ISV solutions in your system. Their licenses will appear in this same tab. You may see that the user count value for some of those other ISV licenses show as 0 or a low number. The licensing mechanism in use in D365FO that Microsoft provides for ISV solution builders like Farsight (and also to those other ISVs who supply your other ISV solutions), freedom to use this usercount value any way they choose.
Most ISVs do not use it at all - hence why all of the other ISV solutions have 0 as the user count value. The user count field is something Microsoft introduced to their AX2012 product about 2011. It has remained in the products ever since.
Regardless of its non-use by most ISVs, we at Farsight, do make use of it - because we know the number of Demand Forecasting users in any given environment is never the same as the licensed/named D365FO users in the system.
Because even very large customers (with hundreds or even thousands of D365FO users on their Microsoft license) who use our product, generally have only a few dozen or so users actively working with Demand Forecasting specifically in D365FO. Which means our licensing mechanism has to be done a little differently than just counting D365FO users.
Using that user count value skillfully, allows us to flexibly license Demand Forecasting for far fewer D365FO users than whatever the number that your current number of D365FO users actually are. As we know the actual users of D365FO can and will change over time.
We use the user count value as the 32 bit long binary number it actually is, and we use those 32 bits in a very precise and structured ways. Which as a side effect of doing so, means that user count value can and does have a wildly varying and usually very large values for any particular customer license.
That number is however fixed to the value it has for the licensed user count of Demand Forecasting users in your license. This number is determined/fixed the moment when we issue the license file to you. That value generally will not change over the lifetime of that Demand Forecasting license. So whatever that number you see now, it will remain unchanged in value from the time you first installed that license, until you load your next (replacement) license file. At which time the value of the usercount field may change.
This clever use of the user count value that we have implemented here, gives customers like yourself the flexibility to license/purchase only the actual number of licenses required for your Demand Forecasting usage. Thus ensuring you do not need to buy more users of Demand Forecasting than are needed.
You can check at any time the number of users you have and are licensed to have in your system, via the Demand Forecasting parameters form. Open that form and then click the "Info" menu button that is present there.
This will pop up a window like this:
This screen is from a Release 10.0 system, regardless of the Demand Forecasting release you have, your screen will be quite similar. We have highlighted the two lines that display the licensed users and current number of Demand Forecasting users information so you can see it.
If you are eagle-eyed, you may also notice that the value shown for the user count in your ISV license screen also shows here as the "License key hash". Thats intentional - as it lets us confirm the user count value from your ISV license has been loaded correctly.
Lastly the license expiry date, also shows in this ISV licenses screen. If the Demand Forecasting license expiry date shows a date in 2099, dates in 2099 are considered by our system to have no expiry.
If the expiry date shown is, however, for a date in the past, or in the near future, you must ensure that this license is either replaced or the Demand Forecasting functionality use is ended, prior to this license expiry date, as the Demand Forecasting ISV license will cease working after that date.
This means Demand Forecasting will no longer show on the D365FO modules menu. But if this happens, when a replacement license is installed, then the new license will reactivate the functionality and all data will be restored .
