Author Licenses: types, differences and how to manage them

When you create a new user in Author through the GlobalAdmin tool, you can assign them four different roles according to their function: Administrator, Manager, Author or Reviewer.

Check these articles to know what permissions each one has and how they work together.

Each user you give the Author role, the ones in charge of creating and editing the authoring units, consumes an Author license. There are two different types: Easy and Professional.

Easy license

This mode is designed for content experts with no previous design knowledge. It allows them to start creating professional content right out of the box, choosing from the available themes, using the pre-designed structures, so that they only have to focus on instructional design and activity creation.

Authors can choose from a list of content blocks provided by the theme to create pages and sections, filling them with their own texts, images and videos. This translates into an agile and easy way of editing, worrying only about the subject matter. Create new pages and pop-ups focusing only on the content (write texts, replace images, set up videos...).

An Author with Easy license cannot alter the structure of the pre-designed content blocks.

Professional license

On the other hand, the Professional mode is intended for users who are not experts in graphic design, but have knowledge of instructional design. More advanced authors who need to make more specific adjustments to the structure of the content. They also start from a theme, but unlike the previous one, they have the freedom to add new elements and components within the pages.

They work at the component level. Starting from the predesigned content blocks, they can alter them, adding or removing elements (a button, a video, an image...), move them in position, add or remove columns... But There is no need to worry about the graphic design and appearance of these components, which are already predefined in the platform.

An Author with a Professional license can alter the structure of the predesigned content blocks.

Difference between licenses

Customization options Easy Author Professional Author

Theme colors (color scheme)

Can choose one of the color schemes from the list provided by the theme

Can choose from the ones offered by the theme, or create his own custom one

Page and section background images

Yes Yes

Modify the structure of the pre-packaged content templates

Can add a predefined structure to the page and later modify its elements, add or delete others, edit and resize columns...

Fonts (typography)

Can change the theme fonts to other fonts added in TTF format

Create his own content templates

Must be ordered as a service

Create new themes

The Easy license has the following functionalities:

Add and remove pages, popups and notifications to content
Add and remove pre-labeled sections of pages and popups
Change the texts, images, videos, audios, and links of the added content blocks
Adding sections with quizzes and activities, and editing them
Changing the color scheme to one provided by the theme
Change the completeness criteria (free or sequential navigation, elements to be interacted with...)
Change the passing criteria (grade calculation criteria, cut-off grade...)
Manage what happens at certain events of the unit (at startup, passing, completion, exit)
Add and remove languages (multi-language content)
Enable integrations with third-party tools
Save versions of content, and retrieve them later

In addition to this, the Professional license has the following functionalities:

Add or remove from the content smaller structures (rows), or individual components (texts, images, videos, buttons, hotspots, flipcards, accordions...)
Change, adding and removing columns to a row, as well as resizing their widths
Create and use a custom color scheme for the content

Manage licenses

Author licenses must be purchased specifically, and have a different cost depending on whether they are Easy or Professional.

Authoring licenses already purchased before these new types came into effect are now equivalent to Professional licenses.

To find out more about purchasing Author licenses, please contact your Learning Consultant or KAM.

To assign a license type to an Author, go to the Users section and look for him in the list. Click on his profile and in the side menu, enter his Author Permissions tab.

Clicking on the drop-down next to the three dots you can choose the type of license he will have, Easy or Professional.

The type of license an Author has is the same for all the projects he works on. It is not possible to have different licenses for different projects.

You can check that the Author does indeed have the permission you have assigned to him. If you search for his profile again, you can see the license type in brackets. Once this is done, the process for assigning permissions to a project is the same as before. If you exceed the limit of licenses you have contracted, if you try to assign a type of license you have already exceeded, you will see a warning message.

Check the licenses

You can know how many licenses in general you have, and specifically how many Easy or Professional, by checking the Reports → Licences section.

In the Licenses table there are three columns that indicate:

how many licenses of that type you have Contracted in total;
how many of them are being Used and how many are currently Availables.

The first row Generals shows all licenses overall, including all users regardless of their role (Administrator, Manager, Author or Reviewer). The following rows show specifically how many Easy and Professional Author licenses you have.

Keep in mind that even if there are available Author licenses, if you have reached the limit of General licenses (Author + Administrator + Manager + Reviewer) youa are not allowed to assign licenses to new users, even if there are available Easy or Professional licenses. You can assign these available Easy or Professional licenses to existing users, modifying their role.

If you want to assign the available Easy or Professional licenses to a new user, you must first cancel the license of an existing user. Or purchase more General licenses.

In the Permissions table, if you click on View users next to each license type, you will see a listing of the users in each category.

This option automatically takes you to the Users section, applying the corresponding filters. From here you can also change the Filters clicking on the funnel icon to see another type of authors.