Why?

Often there is a product 'family' and the 'most commonly sold' is called by the family name.

Through the years, product 'names' change. Think of the different names that Micrsoft Word/Office has had through the years.

When I say "MS-Office" what do you think? I suspect most people think 'Word and Excel' others include OneNote as key, others PowerPoint, and there are several other (more than a dozen) products or modules that are included in different versions and levels of office. The author of his document was part of a beta test of MS-Office in the late 1980's before it even announced. Back then it was simply called 'Word'. Since then it has had names like Office 265, Office 2000, Word 2.0c/Office 92, Small Business, Standard, Professional, Premium, Developer, Standard for Students and Teachers, Office Starter, ProPlus and so on.

In the same way, MCe has been sold in various formats and combinations.

How to read, a MCe product sales code consists of:

A string that suggests it's purpose, things like:

WO - WO's as in Technicians, usually includes Assets at a technician level, Parts at a technician level and may (WO7) contain inventory count.

ICL - Inventory count Light

Admin - Administrators, your MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) people

AI - for our AI tools

API - for our API tools

KPI - for our advanced KPI tools

LoginHub - for identity provider support

DataHub - for importing data on a regular or one time basis from CSV, XLSX and more

Advanced Reporting

MCe Maintenance Connection Desktop app aka MCe MC Desktop app, Windows, Mac, Linux

MCe Desktop app, Windows, Mac, Linux

MCe iOS/iPadOS app

MCe Android app

A number

Think of it as 'a random number', it just is a value that distinguishes between different products. In general, the higher the number, the more power it has. So WO7 is WO4 plus Inventory count. So where are WO1, 2 and 3? 3 never existed. 1 and 2 are older products that we will maintain until the last customer stops using them. There is no WO5 or 6 or 8 at time of writing.

A letter

If it ends with an 'N' it is a named license

If it ends with a 'C' it is a concurrent license

If it ends with an 'E' it is an enterprise license

Others (like DataHub, LoginHub, AI, API don't end in a letter)

Products that have the same value up to this last letter have the same functionality, they just vary in licensing. That is why we will talk about the functionality of "Admin1" or "WO4" but the products we sell are either Admin1C or Admin1N, WO4C or WO4N.

Codes don't change

Well, that's not 100% true, but with the product codes this document is talking about, we try to change them as seldom as possible. WO1N goes back to 2005 (Though for a brief time it was coded as nwo1N - we temporarily tried a more technie numbering system - it didn't go over well with our staff or our customers, so we mad the codes easier to interpret)

Once a productSalesCode is 'sold' or likely even advertised/marketed, we are committed to the concept that its productSalesCode should never be changed. Our testers and developers may have to deal with the occasional change in a name, but if we ever advertise or sell a code, that code can be 'retired' (unused) but it can never be reused for a different product. So once the last customer stops using WO1N ... we will never have a product code of WO1N (unless it is functionally equivalent to that old product.)

btw ... WO1 and WO2 are sold for the same price as WO4, but WO4 has more features available. You can take a WO4 and 'make' it equivalent to a WO1 or 2 by using UI Config to remove features. Those are left as is because the customers who have been using them for more than a decade don't want to have things change and don't want to have to do a setup to turn a WO4 into a WO1 or 2. That is why they 'still exist' until the last user stops using them. We stopped selling them to new customers somewhere around 2018. ALso customers who have WO1 or 2 have a 'free' upgrade path to WO4 should they ever want to.

We also have internal numbers, a GUID

Once a productSalesCode is 'sold', its GUID will NEVER be changed. (In practice, once the GUID is assigned in dev it will never be changed.) A GUID is a Globally Unique identifier, it is a long string of more or less random characters, definitely not as user friendly as our product codes. They typically look like this: d0ebe104-3feb-42d0-832a-504f25f0280c or d0ebe1043feb42d0832a504f25f0280c

But product names will change from time to time, mostly so that it is as simple as possible to know what you are buying.

Name is subject to change without notice, it is mostly the marketing department that assigns and changes the product names, but it will normally stay reasonably 'the same'.

So here is, for example, a change in 2018: wo1N used to be called 'MCe WO Technician' or just simply 'MCe' because it is the main MCe product.

But when we introduced a product in 2018 with extra modules that became our 'most popular' product we sell eventually became known as wo4N and the concurrent version wo4C, those new products became known as 'MCe WO Technician' or just simply 'MCe' and wo1N became known as 'The Legacy MCe'.

Some 'products' that 'everyone' currently gets are below, these are mostly 'housekeeping' products that make it easier for our customers to manage who can do what with the MCe product line, they don't have any visible product codes.

The Basic User Login. When you buy any 'paid' Maintenance Connection Everywhere (MCe) product, you get 'this' product included – because every MCe product requires that you be able to login! The reason it is a PRODUCT is so that our CUSTOMERS can decide which of their users can login to use any of the products. By default 'everyone' but you can change the restrictions. It is an 'enterprise' product, you can let as many people as you want have access to this product. Giving 100 users access to this does not increase how many people can access the paid products like wo04C.

Access Manager (Licenses, Preferences, UI Changes). This is the product that lets you decide which specific users can access which products. So you would normally restrict this product to only a handful of users. By default all users have access to this product because initially someone has to. It is an enterprise product so you can let as many people as you want to use it, there is no direct 'cost' associated with it.

DataHub UI Access - this lets someone who has no other role (probably a programmer type in your company) build the data connectors to import data. It is an enterprise product, but you'll want to restrict who has access if you have our DataHub product. Note that this isn't the paid license to use the DataHub, this is the license to let someone set it up.