How to manage asana licenses

[Amiee_Kane]

I work with an organization of over 4500 employees and manage 125 licenses and the associated billing, which I have to split between several departments. From what I can tell I have no control over who gets a license because my understanding is anyone can invite anyone from our organization to a project and upone acceptance they will automatically be granted a license if they are using a company email address. Is there any way to restrict members’ abilty to send invitations without approval? I know a different plan would be more appropriate for us but for now, this is what we are working with. Thanks for any input you can provide.

[Stephen_Li]

@Amiee_Kane - does your organization use SSO? If so, your best bet is to manage access in that IDP. People will still be able to invite users in Asana, but those people won’t be able finish creating and access their account if they aren’t provisioned in the IDP group.

As you mention, long-term, you’ll want to talk to your Asana rep about maybe changing to a different model (e.g., free organization with paid divisions) where you’ll have more control in-platform on who can invite people onto specific paid teams. I assume you are currently on a paid organization, where I don’t believe you can limit invitation of users within your domain. For more insight on divisions, check out this post:

How to Bar the Door (or, How to keep everyone with your company email domain from joining your Asana Organization)

Most people set up their Asana implementation as an Organization (as opposed to a Workspace), and for good reason - there are many benefits to an Organization over a Workspace. One property of an Organization is that anyone who has an email address based on the email domain of the Organization can join that Organization without asking for or obtaining any sort of approval. In some cases this can be viewed as a good thing in terms of convenience and ease of onboarding. However, it’s important t…

[Dinah_Pu]

We worked with our IT team to create a new email subdomain set up specifically for Asana licenses, ie. @asana.[company.com] and set that as our company email domain in Asana. If we want to allot a license for someone, we provision a new account with IT which is connected to the main account and autoforwards emails. If a team member invites someone to the dedicated asana domain who doesn’t have a license, the invitee would never get the invite bc the email address doesn’t actually exist. If a team member invites someone with the main company domain, they can join and view tasks as Guest.

[Amiee_Kane]

Interesting solution, thank you!

[Emma_Moench]

I have recently been approved to have five paid seats in Asana. My company has said that they will not pay for more seats at this time. When I try to add employees who only need the free version of Asana, they get added to a seat resulting in placing the seats over the approved 5 seats. I have reached out to customer service and they advised me to post in this forum. I am kind of regretting pushing for the paid version because with the free version of Asana, we could assign tasks and due dates. I know there is a way for employees to create an outside company email to be considered as a guest but this would defeat the purpose of Asana. I don’t want my employees to manage two emails. I understand they could merge emails, but I work for the government and that probably won’t be allowed. I feel completely stuck because I wanted to work primarily in Asana, but now a portion of my team has Asana Advanced and the others do not, so I am juggling to do lists in another software. I am wondering if there is another software that might be a better fit.

[Jeremy_Long]

Hi @Emma_Moench, I have merged this into an existing topic. Maybe this reply by Stephen_Li can help?

[Emma_Moench]

Thank you, Jeremy. Is there anyone from Asana that I can talk with on the phone? I want to make this work for my team, but I am not sure how to move forward. I feel stuck using Asana because I can’t function effectively when half of my team does not have access. I can see if Dinah’s work around is an option. Since I work for the government, we may not be able to merge additional emails to our government email accounts.

[Jeremy_Long]

You’re most welcome @Emma_Moench
Unfortunately support only works through the ticket system and from what I understand there is still a backlog. Please keep in mind that submitting additional information on a ticket can push it to the bottom of the queue. However, you may find the sales team to be helpful in this case- you can contact them using this form.

Please let us know if they’re able to help!

Best of luck,

Jeremy

[Vanessa_N]

Hi @Emma_Moench, sorry for the trouble. Your case is in the Support queue and they should reach out soon. Please avoid following up or submitting new requests as it can affect your position in the queue

Although we don’t have access to account details here, it’s likely your plan is set up as a division, which should help resolve the issue based on this recent product update:

@Vanessa_N

Hi everyone, adding some additional context here, but as @lpb said, it’s best to chat with Sales or Support directly since they can view your organization details and provide more specific information for your case.

We are currently updating how membership and licensing work in Asana to improve collaboration between paid and free users. With these changes, you can now have both paid and free users working on the same projects within your organization. Essentially, you’ll set up a “container team”, which will be upgraded to your desired plan, and assign paid licenses to the users within that team.

Members of these container teams covered by the paid plan will have access to the plan’s paid features across all of Asana, including in free teams.

If you create projects in the free teams where both free and paid users (members of the paid container team) are members, the paid users will be able to use paid features in these projects, while free users will only have access to free features. Free users will still be able to trigger rules and access forms created by paid users, as these features depend on that ability, but won’t be able to create rules or forms. Other paid features like timeline and custom fields will be available only to paid users.

We don’t have a guide article for this updated functionality yet, because although this change is already available for all mixed organizations (organizations with a mix of paid and free teams) there’s still some work to be done. But we will add an article to our Help Center covering this topic as soon as everything is ready.

I hope this makes sense!

That said, here’s what you would need to set up your division the correct way (assuming you are a divisional admin):

1. Create new “free” team(s) outside of your division, where all projects requiring collaboration between free and paid users should be placed.
2. Move any relevant projects to these new teams, removing them from the division.
3. Remove any unwanted paid users from the teams within your paid division.

If you’re unsure about making these changes, Support can provide more detailed instructions based on your account details. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

[Emma_Moench]

Vanessa,

This is fantastic news and such a relief. Thank you so much for sharing this information.

[ka_nishiyama]

Is there something called a division as a contract mechanism? However, you need to be careful because some functions are restricted and it can be difficult to operate.

https://help.asana.com/s/article/divisions?language=en_US