Licensing Considerations

License types

The ways that software vendors license their products vary widely.  These include the following:

• Per machine:  Each machine that runs the software must be licensed individually.
• Per individual user: Each user must have purchased a license individually.
• Concurrent user: A set number of users can run the software at any given time.  When one user closes the application, a concurrent license is freed up and another user can use the application, without ever explicitly naming the users.       This is often enabled by a separate, vendor provided license manager that meters launches of the application at any given time, thus maintaining compliance.
• Site license:  A site license enables any campus user to run the application, though there may be other restrictions on this.
• Freeware:  The software is completely free and able to be run by anyone.

Technology Review Process

The Technology Review Process is designed to review all software and technology that will be used at the University of Iowa. The goal is to reduce software duplication, make sure software is licensed correctly, and assess and limit risk from software purchased by the university. This process can include review of IT Security and the University's legal department to examine any security issues or details of the licensing agreement, in order to approve its use.

Licensing Considerations Specific to Hosting in RDS or Virtual Desktop

Though a piece of software may have been reviewed and approved for use at the University of Iowa, all software that is requested to be hosted in RDS or Virtual Desktop must be reviewed again, for purposes or ensuring the software is used in a compliant manner, in terms of the licenses purchased and the software vendor's requirements.  This is because it isn't always possible to ensure software is used only by those who are licensed to run it, depending on which platform it is being run on and the group of users who have access to each platform.

The Technology Review Process is described in detail here, including the requirements and steps to initiate the review of a piece of software.  You should describe what licenses have been purchased for the software and specify that you would like it to be available on RDS or Virtual Desktop.

General Licensing Guidelines

• Freeware, Site licenses and concurrent licenses are best suited to being hosted in a shared, remote platform and are more likely to be approved to run on Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or Virtual Desktop.
• Per machine or Per user licenses might be able to be accommodated but only if the platform (RDS or Virtual Desktop) provides a mechanism to restrict their use to only those licensed to run the software.

Technical Considerations

In addition to licensing requirements, the software must be able to run properly and be supportable in the Remote Desktop Services or Virtual Desktop (Citrix) platforms.

General Technical Guidelines

• Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and Citrix both run on the Microsoft Windows Server OS.  Most software that runs on Windows 10 or 11 will run fine on the Server editions of Windows but there are some vendors that explicitly do not test or support their applications on Windows Server.  This can result in applications not running properly in RDS/Citrix thus causing support issues.  It can also result in a vendor denying any support of their product if it isn't run on specific Windows OS editions.
• Some applications have specific hardware requirements, like a physical graphics card, to function properly.  A common example of these are CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) and other graphics-intensive applications.  RDS and Citrix hosts are Virtual Machine (VM) servers and don't generally have dedicated graphics and other types of hardware available to them.
• Some applications are designed to have full access to the internet or have wide access to the campus network.  This isn't necessary disqualifying but, depending on the platform being considered for application delivery, this can      render the application inappropriate for hosting in the datacenter for security reasons.