Unable to invite new users without purchasing licenses

[Anubis1]

I am the site admin of a paid webex account.

I have two hosting licenses. One license is permanently assigned to the site admin. The other license is dynamically attached and detached to/from one of the other site-users.

The idea is, site-admin is creating meetings as the host while appointing one of the other users as the co-host. Before creating such a meeting, the co-host is attached the second hosting license. Once the meeting is over the license is removed and kept unassigned until I need to create a new meeting. There is only one meeting going on at a given time.

This went fine for quite some time. I have altogether 4 site-users including the admin. Now I can not invite any more new users to my webex site. In the control hub if I click on "Manage Users" button, it opens a new tab and redirects me to subscriptions page. I can add new users there under "Edit Licenses", but then I have to update my current subscription (of 2 licenses) to buy one more license. I don't want to buy more licenses.

I suspect this is a Webex bug. I already have a total of 4 users and two licenses. This started to happen when I tried to add the 5th user.

FYI:

• I am using the webex RestAPI for doing all this. However after facing the issue I tried to do the same manually as well. I'm hitting this issue in both approaches.
• My end goal is to maintain a pool of unassigned licenses and dynamically assign/remove them to/from different site-users on demand. This means, I will have a large number of users without licenses and there will be a relatively small pool of licenses. I hope this is a valid requirement.

[Janos Benyovszki]

@Anubis1 that depends on what you are trying to do with those users. If you are assigning / unassigning host licenses, then yes, I would recommend purchasing licenses. If you only want the users to join your meetings you can use a Guest Account, that way you don't need to buy licenses, but would still have a Webex user, even though not one that can host meetings. You can read more about Guest Users here https://developer.webex.com/docs/guest-issuer .

[Anubis1]

Thank you for the reply. I am aware of guest users. But that doesn't fit my need due to two reasons.

1. I need to be able to map webex meeting participants to my application users. (there's no reliable way to identify guest users)
2. I want to allow my application users to host webex meetings "on demand". That is, they won't normally have assigned licenses. But I assign a license (and remove later) on demand.

Since there will be a small number of meetings at a given time, I don't see a point in having to buy a license per users.

We are currently in the final testing phase. So far I am successfully using a dynamic license pool as explained above. If there is a strong reason to not to do this, I would like to know before going production.

[Raffaele Lagana]

In general, our recommendation is to have separate host licenses for each user you intend to have as host of a meeting. That's how webex was designed. But if you haven't come across any issues while dynamically assigning licenses as needed, then you can probably continue with it. It would be something that you'll need to test thoroughly on your side, as it isn't an intended scenario, but if it works fine for you then you can proceed with it.

[Anubis1]

Thank you for the reply. I will try contacting them.

Can you confirm what I am going to do is technically allowed? That is, can I invite, say, 100 users to my webex site while having only 10 hosting licenses ? Or am I supposed to buy a license for each user I am adding to my webex site ?

[kushal23]

Hello @Anubis1 

We also want the same functionality. Did you get any solutions on this? Or you purchased a License for every user.

Is revoking the License from one user and assigning that to a new user working? Looking forward to your reply.

Thank you.

[Anubis1]

No I didn't buy more licenses. As @Jeff Marshall mentioned, sometimes there was a delay in license changes. I updated my application to anticipate such delays.

[Jeff Marshall]

Removing a meeting license from one user and re-assigning to a different user should work fine. There may be a small delay from time time you remove and add to the new user but it should allow the new user to be a host of meetings.

[Janos Benyovszki]

@Anubis1 based on what you have described, this does not seem to be an API bug, but rather a Webex limitation. I would recommend getting in touch with our TAC team / generic support here https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/web/tsd-cisco-worldwide-contacts.html , they might be clarify this for you and help with a solution.

[Anubis1]

@Janos Benyovszki can you answer the above please.

Can you confirm what I am going to do is technically allowed? That is, can I invite, say, 100 users to my webex site while having only 10 hosting licenses ? Or am I supposed to buy a license for each user I am adding to my webex site ?

---