License Management
3 minute read
The Docusnap License Management allows you to enter the license agreements for purchased software based on the respective licensing model. Docusnap then associates the installed software base with the license agreements and detects any over-licensing or under-licensing situation. Docusnap is able to map all common variants of licensing models, such as per-device, per-user, per-processor, and per-core licensing. Of course, this also allows for upgrading and downgrading as well as for terminal server licensing. Comprehensive features which are suitable to map nearly all use cases relevant to licensing are available, all evaluations being performed at the company level. Some selected examples for such evaluation options will be given in a separate section.
The dataset on which License Management is based consists of the software found during the most recent Network Scan of the systems inventoried in the network. All software installations found will be considered, regardless of the device type or the installed operating system, provided that they have been enabled in the License Management options. In addition, all installations found through the Software Search process, as well as manually entered software products will be included in the License Management evaluations.
Basically there are two ways how the software products are assigned to licensing. Docusnap provides a list of installed software products for which a license can be created. In license management wizard, these products can then be assigned to licensing. As a result all installations of this software product are counted for this licensing. Alternatively you can also use search words. These keywords help you to determine the Software Products found on the inventoried systems. This means that, e.g., different versions of the same software product can be easily covered just by specifying appropriate keywords. An in-depth explanation of the use of keywords and the possibilities they offer will be given in the description of the License Management wizard.
The so-called Software Product form the core component of the License Management module. Each Software Product in the Docusnap License Management sense is a software product, installed in one of the inventoried systems, that needs to be organized. In the tree structure, the software products are displayed in two different ways. All software products and systems of this company are taken into account in the licenses below the respective group. With Docusnap you can create sites. These sites can be allocated to systems and software products. The licenses for this sites are then displayed under the Sites heading and only systems that have been assigned to this site are taken into account.
To each software product, you can assign multiple licenses. These licenses in Docusnap correspond to the real-life software licenses actually purchased and the software contracts signed. From the registered licenses, the License Management module knows how many installations of the software may be found during the inventory process before under-licensing occurs. Depending on the licensing type, the assigned devices or users a license has been issued for are located below each license.
Below the Installations heading the License Management tree view contains several nodes for performing various analyses which will be discussed in a separate section. The Undesired Products node represents a special issue regarding software that should not be found on the target systems. The License Management module provides many comprehensive evaluations in the form of reports.