When a subscription is initially purchased, it must be configured in Subscription Asset Manager. The user accounts used to connect to the Customer Portal cannot be used to manage those systems. The lo is created in Customer Portal Subscription Management. That administrator can create other user accounts, associated with the overall company account, which (with the proper permissions) can also manage systems and subscriptions. Creating and managing Customer Portal accounts is described in Managing User Access to the Red Hat Customer Portal and the RHN Application.

Subscription Asset Manager is an on-premise application. When an IT administrator is initially accessing subscription manifests and managing subscriptions across the Red Hat account, those actions are performed through the Customer Portal, so a Customer Portal user account is used to set up and manage the Subscription Asset Manager application itself.

A user account is associated with an activation key and is used to redeem the activation key — but which user account to use depends on who issued the key. If a key was created by a vendor, then they will also define a user account to use with the key, as will Red Hat if the key were issued by Red Hat. For activation keys created by local IT departments using Subscription Asset Manager, then the associated Subscription Asset Manager user account is to be used.