So far in this section all we seem to have talked about is software products. However, the whole point of software products is to describe/model how software installations relate to software assets/licenses. So having audited the software on the network and configured the software products how we want, the next thing we need to do is fairly obvious: we need to go ahead and record the software assets that we own.
Software assets in ENT Server will fall into one of three basic categories:
| 1. | Software Licenses – these are mainly what we’re interested in here. These licenses may permit you to make individual installations of a particular product or to install that product site wide at a particular location. |
| 2. | Physical Media – in some cases media and licenses are one in the same, and often times companies don’t make their products available for download (a license is all well and good if you can’t physically install the product) so it can often be very important to track the media that you have for various products. |
| 3. | Maintenance Contracts – although not always directly related to the installations (you may install software for products even though you don’t have a support contract for these products), maintenance contracts often imply/include the right to upgrade to new versions for the duration of the contract and, even when these are limited to support, comprise an important part of the conditions under which you license the software that you use. |
We’ll leave a full description of “how to” record software assets to the help files for ENT Server, since this more didactic information is already covered in some detail there. Here we’ll try to give more of a conceptual bird’s eye view of how we can record the relationship between software assets and software installations.
Probably the most important piece of information that you will record about each of the software assets in your inventory that constitutes a license is the License Type. This is the primary indicator of how that software license relates to the software installations on the network.
| • | User Licenses are used to indicate that the software is licensed, not surprisingly, per user. Typically if you have 50 user licenses of a product then you have a license to install as many as 50 instances of that product the various computers that you manage. This is one of the most common licensing methods and the |
| • | OEM Licenses are licenses which are bundled with the computer at the time of purchase by the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Typically these licenses cost significantly less than the full retail version of the same product or operating system, but can only ever be used on that particular machine - so if the computer gets blown up by terrorists or struck by lightning then you won't be able to transfer the licenses of any OEM software that were installed on that machine to another [new] computer that you purchase. As such, in ENT Server we provide various different fields that you can use to associate an OEM license with the particular machine that it was purchased for (including the machine asset tag, machine name and serial number). This additional information (in conjunction with the Product Key which is detected during audits) can be used to ensure that your OEM licenses are installed only on the machine(s) that they were purchased for. |
| • | Site Licenses are another common method of licensing software. In the case of site licenses, rather than requiring a separate license for each separate instance of the software that you have installed, you may hold a license to install and use as many copies of the software as you like, either at a particular location (or site) or across the enterprise. In this case, the actual site itself is obviously quite important (especially if your network spans multiple separate locations and software is licensed separately for each of those locations) – and so you’ll see that “License” and “License and Media” asset types both have a Location field that you can use to record the particular Managed Site that the site license applies to. |
| • | Proprietary Licenses refers to any licenses where the software is licensed by the publisher in a proprietary fashion and may include it’s own proprietary license management system. A perfect example of this is ENT Server itself. The technicians/managers that use ENT Server can access this via either a web browser (which obviously requires no installation of the software) or via ENT NetCenter and ENT Report Forge (of which they can install and use as many copies as they like – all over the network). In this case the software (ENT Server) comes bundled with tools to help you manage licenses for the ENT Server and ensure the proprietary license requirements of the software so that you never use more licenses than you own – so there is probably no need to include this product in Software License Analysis reports. |
| • | Freeware Licenses are typically a carte blanche to install/use as many copies of a particular piece of software as you like. You have to be careful, since some products are only freeware for personal or non-profit use. However, if your organization is eligible for such a license then you can record Freeware Licenses for these products as software assets in your inventory. This would probably be quite onerous to do and it will usually be easier to simply flag the product as one that you’re not interested in tracking (using the Track Licensing field).
One reason you might want to record a freeware license is, although unlikely, would be if one of the networks that you managed was effectively that of a non-profit organization (which qualified for a freeware license of a product) and another network that you managed was not. In the case that the software was licensed as freeware only to private individuals and non-profit organizations, you could record one freeware license of the product (associated with the site/network that was non-profit) so as to “exclude” only licenses at that particular site from software license analysis reports. |
