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.

[Aaron40]

Hi.

"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."

If a ticket is opened on behalf of someone else, that person in the caller field should still be able to modify the record even if they don't have a role. Are you saying that's not what it looks like it's doing today?

[Andrew Pishchul]

If a ticket is opened on behalf of someone else, that person in the caller field should still be able to modify the record even if they don't have a role. Are you saying that's not what it looks like it's doing today?

It is, but here is a tricky point: all is clear if we use such words as "incident", "caller" etc. But what if we have a custom table (lets say a custom Request table) and there are 2 business owners for a ticket (two fields on a form - one is for a user from Accounting dept and another one is for Finance dept) - IT user creates a ticket and put those business users into it. And here is a question: do those business users have to have a license in order to modify a ticket?

[Aaron40]

Good question.

I'd imagine if you had a caller field on each of your custom tables you should be okay. You'd be even better if your custom tables didn't have much for roles to begin with.

But if you are asking how you'd get two "owners" to be able to modify the same record, I don't know. Most of the ACLs are based on the caller or the created by field. You'd have to change the created by field to someone who should be able to modify the record.. though that's not really a good idea for audit purposes. I don't know if you can legitly have two non-roled users edit the same record at the same time.

[Andrew Pishchul]

> But if you are asking how you'd get two "owners" to be able to modify the same record, I don't know...

There are no problems from technical point of view - we can create custom ACL, fields, tables etc. Technical part of implementation is not a problem and we do not need assign any 'roles' to business users in order to accomplish that.

The problem is that ServiceNow license policy does not have a definition of "owner":
- Who is an owner? How to identify an owner if we have 5 user-reference field on a ticket form? Is it only one person? (it's weird, there might be hundreds of use cases where a ticket has multiple owners/business users)
- If there may be multiple owners indeed, then a ticket may be modified by multiply business users and those users should not require any licenses!!!

I'm waiting for a feedback from SN, it's very important licensing questions, which may cost a lot of $.

[ayush_saxena]

Is this thing not applied on demo. I just tried Impersonating an end user and i was glad to see all incidents in place on this instance.

Moreover, the contract states about approver_user role for approval license but i was not able to locate any such role on any demo.