Questions on licensing

[geek1]

Hi everyone,

I have a few questions on licensing that I was hoping someone here could shed some light on.
1) Licenses are only tracked on prod, correct? Sn doesn't care about the lower environments?
2) Do INACTIVE user accounts who have a role attached to them really count as a license in production? I'm speaking of accounts that do exist in the system but can't be logged into.
3) I was told some things CAN be done without granting someone a role. Can someone validate the following?
***You can allow non-roled people to use Reporting (not so EVERYONE can use it, but there's a way we can get it so a list of people can access reporting without costing a license)
***There's a way to allow someone to work on an incident without requiring a role or a license. I was told they can't be assigned the incident itself but perhaps a task can be attached to it and assigned to the person.
***Approvers - I was informed that managers who do nothing more than approve requests can do so without costing a role or license.

Any insight you have on this would be much appreciated! We have way more licenses used than we'd like right now and are trying to free some of them up.

[zschneider]

From my understanding, a lot of the specifics around licensing are done during the contract and can vary from company to company. You'd likely want to check with your regional rep about any changes you make for non-licensed use if you're worried about breaking the agreement in your contract.

1.) Licenses are not tracked on sub-prod instances, but giving licenses to users in sub-prod that do not have them in production goes against the grain of what sub-production instances are used for.

2.) Inactive users with a license still show up on the license report that Service-Now generates.

3.) a.) Service-Now reporting can be used without a license. The easiest way is to just publish a report and then use the global url for non-licensed users. Though you can also change the ACLs around reporting to allow non-licensed users to run reports.

b.) You can use the ESS portal for non-licensed use which can allow a non-licensed user to interact with a ticket. For example we've been working on a project to allow non-licensed users update the customer communication field for a ticket from a ui page. Assigning sub-tasks to a non-licensed user and allowing them to update the standard ticket would be sketchy as far as I know, you'd likely want to talk to your service-now rep.

The rule of thumb we've always used is that VIEWING information does not require a license while CREATING information in the system does. The exception to this rule is automated accounts that use integration with other applications or back-end scripts to populate data does not require a license.

[Kshitij Sheth]

if I am creating a change as an end user(non-licensed) from Record Producer /ESS Portal and updating a CI record through business rule. Will it require any kind of license?

[Aaron40]

What I've learned in the past is if there is a question on what's going to require a license or what we are able to do to get around using licenses, ask your ServiceNow contact. There's been a time or two I've been asked to find ways around the system to allow non-licensed users the ability to perform quite a bit of work within the system.

If you are using a Record Producer and have some scripting on that Record Producer to do something with whatever data you get, that doesn't sound like it should require a license. Forms are designed such that ESS users have the ability to create records. Licenses usually come to play when you want someone to "work on" those records.

When in doubt, go to your ServiceNow contact. Everyone's license agreement is different.

[Andrew Pishchul]

ServiceNow changed their license policy on Oct 1, 2013 and I'm confused about that document.

I don't understand why non-licensed users (business users) cannot see other tickets from their own department (it doesn't require any roles at all). They can see only the tickets, which they created.

SN say that 'auditor' role (read-only access to all tickets) requires an additional license.. why? it's not a process user and auditors do not modify tickets.

They also say that non-licensed users can "create and modify only their own tickets". But what about a fundamental use case, where an IT user creates an incident and puts a business user name into a caller field? Incident has been create by one person and a non-licensed user can modify that incident.