Manage Licenses
by
jack
—
last modified
2007-12-13 18:45
This is a nice place you got... be a shame if something happened to it...
Software licensing takes attention; if you don't already have a plan for handling it, here's what to do.
- Make time. This task is boring and annoying, and it won't do itself. If you don't do it, you'll just be complaining next year that it didn't get done.
- Specifically, go to your calendar and block at least an hour every other week. You might even want to start with an hour per week until you've gotten through your backlog.
- In the LANDesk console, Software License Monitoring, Automatically Discovered Products, you'll find all the products that your company uses.
- The list is produced by dumping the MSI database, DMGs, PKGs, and watching anything that gets run. That produces some junk -- anything with "uninstall" in its name can be right-clicked and ignored, along with anything named underscore-followed-by-some-numbers-dot-exe. If you're not on 8.7 Service Pack 4 yet, doing this may be painfully slow, so plan accordingly.
- Next, right-click and ignore the products that don't have license issues. If it's free, you don't care about tracking its license, right? Note, that doesn't include site-licensed products, at least for most people. SLM is where you find out if people are using products, and it's good to know that the product you pay a quarter million a year for is only being used by 15% of the company.
- Finally, put the stuff you do care about into compliance groups.
- Licenses don't necessarily map to products. For instance, Microsoft and Adobe both break their big suites into sub products, even though they license the whole bundle. There are good and bad implications to this fact.
- Different installation media produce different product IDs which produce what looks like duplicate records. If you have three instances of Microsoft Office Professional 2003, it means that some of your users are using MSDN or Retail CDs to install. You want to investigate and, if possible, stop that from happening. Check out this tool.