Whats a SEN

Owned by Andy Brook [Plugin People] (Unlicensed)
Aug 12, 2015
2 min read

 

Quoting Will Hayworth from the atlassian-marketplace newsgroup, storing here for reference! 

SEN actually stands for "Support Entitlement Number." *Only paid licenses
have SENs.* And a SEN should stay constant over the life of a given
customer's use of your particular add-on (i.e. across renewals and
upgrades). One caveat: a given BTF add-on will have its own SEN distinct
from the parent product, but a cloud add-on *won't *due to some arcana on
our end. This means that if you sell multiple Cloud add-ons to the same
Cloud instance (hooray!), they'll all have the same SEN for your reporting
purposes (sorry).
 
The reason that SENs differ for trials and from trial to purchase is
that *those
aren't real SENs*.
 
 
SENs are only for paid licenses, remember? *Trial SENs are actually SEN-Ls.*
The L stands for license. A given license--that is, license key, with
encoded support dates and user counts--has exactly one SEN-L. So when a
customer extends their evaluation of your BTF add-on--you guessed it!--they
get a new one-month license with its own unique SEN-L. When a customer
renews or upgrades, of course, they also receive a new license key with its
own unique SEN-L, but we try not to expose that information because they're
a paid customer and the more consistent correlation factor is their SEN.
 
Finally, an example: a customer, let's call them something random--Adam
Wride, perhaps--decides to try out the StacksOnDemand JIRA Plugin for AWS
in their JIRA instance. Adam starts a trial and is provisioned a license.
That license has SEN-L123456. Adam doesn't have a SEN for StacksOnDemand
yet because no purchase has taken place. After 30 days, Adam decides to
extend the trial and receives license SEN-L234567. After 30 more days, Adam
decides to buy StacksOnDemand. Hooray! Adam receives a license with
SEN-32456. Should Adam upgrade StacksOnDemand, the upgraded license will
keep SEN-32456. It'll have some random SEN-L under the hood but if that's
exposed we'd see it as a bug.
 
I hope that makes more *sen*se (see what I did there?) and I'm sorry this
stuff isn't more widely known (I'm looking for a less ephemeral venue for
it). It took me a while to get it all straight, and I'm on the team! Please
don't hesitate to ask us for further clarification and thanks for
everything you all do every day to build our ecosystem.