Tracking Concurrent or Site Licenses

[judi_secoges]

How is everyone handling tracking licenses when they are concurrent or by site? I want to capture the fact that I have 5 concurrent licenses, but it seems the system wants named user so it only allows 5 user entitlements. With concurrent you can have 20 people using the product. I don't want to put an arbitrary number in the rights box, but I'm not sure the best way to handle.

[Community Alums]

I have some thoughts on each of these, but the solutions are not perfect and may require some work with Contracts and your process.

Concurrent Licenses

Tracking concurrent licenses is a bit tricky. We do not really have a way in ServiceNow to determine if your users are actually using the software concurrently or not. This will make it difficult to determine exactly whether or not you are compliant for the software.  

It does not sound like you are looking to manage this aspect of it, though. You just want to know how many concurrent licenses you have and who is entitled to use those concurrent licenses, correct? Here is a possibility:

• Configure your Software License with the number of concurrent rights you've purchased.
• Create a Software License Contract and set the type to either Enterprise or Subscription. Add the Users who are entitled to use this software as being covered by the contract rather than using the standard entitlement. This information can allow you to match up users who should be using the software.

Site Licenses

You could do something a little similar for site licenses, but it really depends on the agreement you have with the software publisher on what the best approach might be.

• Do you receive unlimited use of the software at a particular site or will you need to "true up" on a regular basis?
• If someone relocates from one site to another, will they then be covered under the new site's license if one exists?

My first thought would be to be to create Software License records for each of your sites with the initial numbers you need to entitle. Tie these to an Software License Contract with a type of Enterprise. This ensures you show as compliant. Then, as part of your process for this software, identify if the site already has a license, and create a new Software License record with appropriate rights and entitlements to match the number of new users utilizing the site license at that site.

[jake_mckenna]

On the site licenses one thought i had would be to setup the Enforce to = Strict and setup the grouping to be by location. The next step would be to set the license counter to something such as No license needed (Workstation). During my testing I had a license for each site that was entitled to the software and any device that had a location that was not entitled would be marked as so. Obviously this is just another possibility to test out for whatever might work for your situation.

[Community Alums]

Yes, I guess I could have been a little more explicit about how to identify the Software License as being for the site. Thanks for clarifying, Jake. I haven't played with the No license needed type yet, but this could be an interesting use of it.