Who Should Buy a Named User License
Any small to medium sized business will do well with a named user license. Companies with regional offices or geographically displaced teams with less than 10,000 employees would benefit from the named user license. Once you exceed 10,000 employees it behooves you to consider the Unlimited Named Users license for reasons such as customization to your larger workforce (i.e. integration into your intranet website through modification of the source code). A “named user” is anyone with a personal login to the Status Reporting Tool. This allows individuals to track their performance, enables Human Resources to better prepare for annual reviews and manage personnel interactions, and gives management an ability to see where their organizations shine and where there is room for improved communication.
Benefits
A Named User License benefits an organization in many ways, some of which are:
- Facilitates the communication of expectations of the individual
- Assists management objectively evaluate an individual’s performance
- Provides an objective means for Human Resources personnel assist others with personnel issues
- Provides Senior Management with feedback on the effectiveness of organizational initiatives
What to Expect
With each Named User License, you will receive an e-mail within 1 business day with the URL to download your binary copy. You may use as many web servers as necessary to balance your bandwidth, but you may use only one database repository. All users are registered in this database and the total count will be restricted to the number of named users you license. You will receive 30-days of online (i.e. online chat or e-mail) and phone support. You may purchase additional ongoing support separately. Support contracts ensure that you receive all updates in that major version line. Upgrades are priced separately. Installation, Administration and User Guides may be downloaded separately.
What You Need
At a minimum, you need a Java Servlet container, such as Tomcat. (Note: as of this time, Tomcat is the only container tested and certified.) You’ll want to keep your data behind your firewall, so an intranet address fire walled from the internet is highly desirable. A virtual private network (VPN) is not required unless you wish to access your Status Reports from outside the company’s firewall. It is entirely possible to run the Status Reporting Tool on the internet (e.g. http://www.yourcompany.com/). We highly recommend that if you do so, you use a separate HTTP listener such as Apache in front of Tomcat and secure it with self-signed certificates at a minimum (i.e. use the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to encrypt all traffic). The reason we suggest Apache is that you can configure it to not respond to the HTTP_TRACE command. As your concurrent user access grows, you may wish to use more than one web server. This is permissible with any license. We highly encourage you to consider, but do not require, a separate server for your database. The use of a separate server allows you to partition it off from the inter/intranet and gives you a little more protection from hackers.
Recommendations
We strongly recommend that organizations larger than 100 employees and/or any organization large enough to have its own Human Resources staff also purchase a consulting agreement. It’s one thing to install the Status Reporting Tool (i.e. throw it into the /webapps directory and set some property files to point to a database). Implementing it within your organization is another matter. Before you establish your first template, you should ask some very specific questions about what it is you expect from your individuals, what it is you want to report on, and what it is you expect from this process. You should always keep in mind that you’re embarking on process improvement, not simply installing a software package!
Additionally, we highly recommend that organizations purchase annual support contracts. Annual support contracts ensure that you’re kept up-to-date with every update that we produce for that version. For example, if you license v2.0 and we put out 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3, you receive all three updates at no additional cost. We also focus on the business requests of our annual support holders first as we know they’re committed to the process of improving their organization.
