Knowledge Base

This article will review how Specops Password Reset affected/subscription licenses are consumed.

Both affected (perpetual) and subscription licenses use the same model to count licenses — the count is based on the number of enabled Active Directory user accounts that have a Specops Password Reset GPO applied to them in Active Directory.

Check Current License Usage

The Password Reset reporting page (https://yourservername/SpecopsPassword/Reporting) will show a summary of all Password Reset GPOs and the number of licenses consumed by each one.

Adjusting License Consumption

Find the Group Policy with the same name in the Group Policy Management Console in the Windows Administrative Tools. Verify which locations the policy is linked to and whether security filtering is set to a security group or the default Authenticated Users.

To check the number of enabled users in each linked OU run the following Active Directory PowerShell command, changing the OU DN to your own.

Get-ADUser -searchbase "OU=Users,OU=Specops,DC=specopsdemo1,DC=com" -Filter { enabled -eq  $true} | Measure-Object

If you also need to filter on a security group, we will use a slighty different command. Change the group name and OU path for your environment:

Get-ADGroupMember "SPR Users" -Recursive | where { $_.DistinguishedName -like "*,OU=Users,OU=Specops,DC=specopsdemo1,DC=com" } | Get-ADUser | where {$_.enabled -eq $true } | Measure-Object

In order to reduce license consumption any of the following changes can be made:

• Link the GPO on different sub-OUs and disable/delete the current links
• Change the Security Filtering to limit the GPO’s scope to a security group and/or adjust membership of the scoped security group
• Deny applying the GPO to a security group via advanced delegation on the GPO

Once changes have been made, run a new user count by clicking “Initiate new user count” on the Reporting page where you checked license usage at the start of the article, or wait for the daily license count to run on its own in order for the counts to be updated.