The two plans
A licence covers an organisation, identified by its Microsoft tenant — not a named person and not a device. Anyone signing in from a licensed tenant gets the app.
| Plan | Reach | Everything else |
|---|---|---|
| Tenant | Your own Microsoft 365 tenant. | Identical. Every other feature in the app is governed by the signed-in administrator's own Entra and Exchange roles, not by the plan. |
| Partner | Your own tenant plus your delegated (GDAP) customer tenants. |
That really is the whole difference. There is one licensed capability in CloudSergeant — whether it may reach beyond your own tenant — and it exists because a partner evaluating the product is evaluating it against their customers, not against their own directory. Everything else is decided by Microsoft roles.
On a Tenant licence the tenant picker is still visible, and explains that customer tenants need a Partner licence. Your customer list is never requested in that case.
Licence states
The server decides the state; the app never infers it from a plan name or a purchase date.
| State | The app | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Trial | Fully usable | Nothing — it behaves as a live licence. |
| Active | Fully usable | Nothing. |
| Past due | Fully usable | A notice that the licence needs attention, with a Manage subscription link. Access continues through the grace period — a billing problem does not lock you out mid-task. |
| Unregistered | Disabled | An invitation to register the organisation. |
| Expired | Disabled | A notice with a Manage subscription link. |
| Suspended | Disabled | A notice with a Manage subscription link. |
"Disabled" means the administration features are unavailable — it does not trap you. Manage subscription, Check licence status and signing out all remain available, so you can always get yourself out of the state you are in.
Separately, a version marked as required also disables the app, and that notice cannot be dismissed. An available update is only a dismissible notice.
The Beta Trial
During the controlled Beta an organisation can start a one-time, 30-day Partner Beta Trial. It is on the Partner plan deliberately — a trial that could not reach a customer tenant would not demonstrate the product to the people it is for.
Starting one requires:
- Signing in to the subscription page as a Microsoft Entra Global Administrator of the organisation. Nobody else can register a tenant or manage its subscription; if you are not one, the page shows the plans and asks you to have a Global Administrator continue.
- Entering your company name explicitly — it is never guessed from your display name.
- Entering your organisation's billing address and a contact email address, which is where licence and invoicing correspondence goes. A shared mailbox works better than a personal one.
- Accepting the terms. The time and the version you accepted are recorded.
It is refused if the organisation is suspended, already has a licence, or has used its trial before. That last marker is permanent, so a trial cannot be restarted by removing the licence.
There is no checkout, no pricing page and no card entry in the product during the Beta. Subscriptions are set up and changed by IT Ribe directly, and a manually administered licence cannot be altered by any payment process. When self-service billing is switched on, this page will say so.
Working without a network
The app does not need to reach us to work. It checks the licence at most once every 24 hours, and holds the answer locally in between. Check licence status — in the licence notice, or on the Settings page's CloudSergeant subscription card — bypasses that interval when you have just had a change made.
Each successful check comes with an offline window — how long the answer stays trustworthy without another check. It is set by the server, and is at most ten days. Within that window a network failure changes nothing: no error, no nag, no interruption. Past it, the app asks you to reconnect.
The offline window is not the same thing as the subscription's end date, and one is never substituted for the other. A licence valid for another year still re-checks within ten days; a licence ending next week has an offline window no longer than that.
The cached licence is encrypted with Windows DPAPI for your user account, and bound to the tenant and the installation. Copying the file to another machine, another Windows user or another tenant will not make it load, and a modified file is rejected rather than trusted.
We would rather describe that honestly than oversell it: this is tamper-evident local storage, not a claim that software running on a machine somebody fully controls cannot be altered. It is there so that ordinary use is reliable offline and the licence state cannot be quietly edited — not as a copy-protection guarantee.
What the licence check sends
Four things, and nothing else: your own tenant id, the signing-in administrator's identity from the Microsoft token, the version of the app, and an opaque installation id. No customer tenant, no mailbox, no counts, no results. The full boundary is here.
