Merging products covered by a single license

During audits, ENT Server can only detect information about the computers that you manage and the products that are installed on these computers – it won’t know anything about how these products are licensed. So software assets such as media and licenses that you own will obviously have to be entered manually.

Additionally, ENT Server can only be so smart in terms of identifying what constitutes a product. Although Widgets 1.1 and 1.2 might be covered by the same license, ENT Server won’t know about this out of the box – this is information that you’ll have to provide after having audited the software installed on the computers that you manage.

If ENT Server finds an instance of Widgets 1.1 on one machine and an instance of Widgets 1.2 on another machine, and if software products for each of these software installs do not already exist in your ENT Inventory, then ENT Server will create two products in your ENT Inventory automatically – one called Widgets 1.1 and another by the name of Widgets 1.2. Effectively it will treat two different versions of the product as separate products.

In some cases this will be exactly what you want (for example, if you need to pay for the upgrade from Widgets 1.1 to Widgets 1.2). However, if version 1.1 and 1.2 of Widgets are not licensed as separate products and Widgets 1.2 is a free upgrade for Widgets 1.1 users, you probably want to be able to apply licenses for Widgets 1.x to installations of both Widgets 1.1 and Widgets 1.2.

What you can do in this case is merge the two products "Widgets 1.1" and "Widgets 1.2" into a single "Widgets 1" product. This tells ENT Server to associate all installations of both Widgets 1.1 and Widgets 1.2 with a single product: Widgets 1.

It is important to stress that we are merging the products Widgets 1.1 and Widgets 1.2. We are not merging any information about the individual installations of these products - that information is still faithfully recorded on the Software page of the Computer Details dialogue (along with specific version information such as Widgets 1.1 and Widgets 1.2). So in merging these two products we will not loose any information about the specific versions installed on each of the machines on the network.

In summary, although you may want to know that Widgets 1.1 is installed on ORISIS and Widgets 1.2 is installed on ARTEMIS (information that isn't lost by merging software products), you may want to treat these as equivalent for the purposes of software licensing. That is what the Merge Software function in your ENT Inventory is for.