Classify Users as Internal Users
Applies to OutSystems licenses purchased after January 2020.
OutSystems identifies two different types of registered end users for licensing purposes: Internal Users and External Users.
OutSystems classifies registered users according to the following rules:
*When adding a new environment, all your users are internal by default. Check here how to configure external users.
Defining user classification rules
Classification rules are configured per environment using Service Center, and you can have different classification rules in different environments.
Note that when adding a new environment, all your users are internal by default.
OutSystems checks for registered active users when determining the number of Internal/External Users in an environment. Also, user classification in Internal Users or External Users applies only to Registered Users (or Named Users).
Anonymous Users aren't taken into account for this classification. Check End User Management for more information on end user classification.
So, let’s look at these rules in detail.
Ensuring that users are ready to be classified as Internal and External
To be able to configure your users as internal or external make sure that:
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Your users have a valid email address. This email address can exist in the Username field or Email field of your user.
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You keep in mind that users without a valid email address will always be classified as Internal Users.
Configuring the users to be internal or external
You can configure your users to be internal or external by using Internal User domains. The User Classification rules field can contain one or more domains separated by commas.
OutSystems considers that a subdomain is a different value from its domain. To classify users based on a subdomain, add a value to the User Classification rules field for the subdomain.
For example, to classify a user with the email address scott.green@sales.mycompany.com as an Internal User, the User Classification rules field value must contain the sales.mycompany.com subdomain.
To configure your internal user domains, do the following:
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Open the Service Center management console of your environment.
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Navigate to Administration > Licensing and click the "End-Users Configuration" link.
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In User Classification Rules, select the option Only users registered with these domains count as Internal and enter the domain names associated with the email addresses of Internal Users.
Separate multiple domains using a
,(comma) character.For example,
mycompany.comandsales.mycompany.com:
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Click Save.
After saving your changes, OutSystems starts the process of obtaining the current Internal/External User count. This process might take a few minutes. The Last update on label displays the finish date/time of the last user count process.
User classification examples
Let’s look to some examples on how to classify users.
In this example, consider that the following user domains were added in the User Classification rules field:
mycompany.com,sales.mycompany.com
By adding these two domains, the following examples detail the classification of each user according to their Email and Username attribute values:
| Username | User Classification | |
|---|---|---|
| sgreen | scott.green@mycompany.com | Considered an Internal User |
| sgreen | scott.green@sales.mycompany.com | Considered an Internal User |
| jane.green@mycompany.com | <empty> |
Considered an Internal User |
| sjones | scarlett.jones@outsourcing.com | Considered an External User |
| sdavidson | samantha.davidson@finance.mycompany.com | Considered an External User, because classification rules consider subdomains different from domains (sales.mycompany.com <> mycompany.com) |
| mjohnson | <empty> |
Considered an Internal User |
Check the total number of Internal/External users
You can check the current usage of Internal and External Users — both the total number of each end user type and their distribution per User Provider — for a given environment in Service Center.
To check the number of Internal/External Users do the following:
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Open the Service Center management console of the environment.
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Navigate to Administration > Licensing and click the "End-Users Configuration" link.
This page displays the total number of Internal and External Users, as well as their distribution per User Provider in the current environment.
Note: A timer executes the process of determining the current user count, and therefore the displayed user count values might not reflect the exact user count.
Single user account for multiple User Providers
In your ecosystem, you can have different User Providers for different applications. For example, you can have legacy applications that are using a User Provider, other than the Users application.
In such cases, it is also common that some users require access to both the legacy applications and the more recent ones.
Because they have different User Providers, the user needs to have a different account in each application, even though it’s the same user, with the same username, email, name, etc.
Until Platform Server 11.11.3 these users are counted as different users for licensing purposes.
From Platform Server 11.11.3 onwards, identical users (same username or same email) in different User Providers are counted as a single user for licensing purposes, as long as they are in the default tenant.
Note that any account with the same username or email that exists in another tenant, that is not the default tenant of that User Provider, is counted as a new user. This happens because different tenants can have users in common that are not the same user.
To better understand this, picture a scenario where you have a company providing a SaaS solution to two insurance companies.
In this scenario, one person can be a customer of both insurance companies and have insurance products in both companies and be using the exact same email address in his contact details in both companies also.
So, although the user exists in both tenants, it is not a shared account, counting that way as a different user for each company.
The following diagram explains how multiple accounts are considered as the same user:
