I understood that you had to have bought your 'light' licences before October 12th 2012 in order to benefit from the 'free' upgrade in NAV2103. I would be suspicious of the suggestion that you can carry on buying light licences and then transform these into full NAV2013 licences when you upgrade just because your original licence pre-dates October 12th 2012.

Dear Babic, Thats a nice written article about the differences between light and limited. However, for the benefit of you and our other readers, I would like to point out one mistake: Quote Any customer, who first bought their Business Ready license for NAV before October 12, 2012, gets one Full User license for each Light User license they acquired. .... Not only is the upgrade path generous towards existing customers, but it also allows for some level of manipulation. A customer who licensed NAV before October 12 can still purchase Light User licenses that can be upgraded to Full User licenses in the Perpetual model when the customer decides to upgrade to NAV 2013. Unquote The above statements are not true. All customers who purchased Light Users before July 2012 (not October 2012) will be transitioned to full users. Microsoft changed the SKU of Light Users to "Limited Light Users" from July 2012. This means that customers can only purchase "Limited Light users" on 2009 after July 2012. The transition path for Limited Light Users is - 3 Limited Light Users (2009) -> 1 Limited User (2013). Hence customers cannot manipulate. Regards, Burjis

We are finding major problems trying to confirm whether a prospect can use the Limited user option. The senarios are suggesting that if the user is just doing one process then they can be Limited, this suggests if you have a Sales Clerk that is just entering Sales Orders that they can be Limited. However the SO has two tables, if they use Assemble to Order thats another table, if there are approval templates set up then thats another table. It wouldnt be so bad if you could set up a Limited User and test the required access but in 2013 currently the structure isn't set up and the Limited User option is not restricted to 3 tables yet. This means we can't confidently sell Limited Users. I appreciate that there is an upgrade path but we don't want to mislead prospects/customers.

As somewhat of a follow up to heles11, where specifically can a limited user be deployed? I understand read-only, though what kind of role can use the limited user license? I ask Microsoft and they just send me random links to Partnersource documents. haha

Thanks to all for the comments. The ERP Perpetual Licensing Guide states clearly that the break date is October 1 - the date of October 12 in the original blog is indeed a typo. I am unaware of the date of July 2012, as I can't verify it in the ERP Perpetual Licensing Guide which simply doesn't mention this date. However, I've checked and noticed that FAQ on PartnerSource indeed mentions the July 11, 2012 as the final date for eligibility to upgrade to Full User. Therefore - there is mismatch in Microsoft's official communication and documentation. The Licensing Guide say one, the FAQ say another thing.

Heles11 - the licensing guide is very specific about what you can, and what you cannot do with the limited user. It's three tables, plus any of the tables listed in the appendix. In my opinion, it would be extremely difficult for customers to configure the sales order entry as a process that they can apply the Limited User license to. In most situations, you simply end up having more than three tables affected. By the way - the Sales Order entry process is one of those processes that triggered Microsoft to shift away from Light User to limited user, because it was felt that allowing Light Users to enter sales orders was not a good solution. Also - there is a difference between what you are licensed to do, and what NAV tracks that you are doing. Even though it could be possible to "cheat" NAV into thinking that full users actually are limited users, it's not recommended - because even if you manage to cheat NAV into believing you are using limited users, you are still mislicensed. Therefore, to be on the safe side - don't sell the limited user license as long as your process ends up writing into more than three tables (except those tables listed in the appendix to the licensing guide).