Handling Entitlements where you don't have your original purchase

[Nancy Schilli]

I have a client that is starting SAM in servicenow. some of their original purchase information is not available, since it's been many years. THey do have a PPN, but it's for maintenance. We added the entitlement via PPN, it was marked as maintenance and wouldn't allow them to allocate, which is normal. So we change it from maintenance to perpetual+maintenance, and it still didn't allow them to allocate. I'm assuming it's because the PPN overrides the license type. They could enter another record for the perpetual + maint, and not use a PPN and enter a start date say 10 years ago.  

question 1 - what is best practice for when you have older licenses and don't or have to guess to go back in time. 

question 2 - You purchase License 1 on year 1, you purchase another license on year 3. so now you have 2 entitlement records that denote what you own. do you end up allocating users to both licenses, haven't tried to see if you can over allocate to one of the licenses. 

question 3 - you have a license year 1, maintenance for next 3 years. allocations on year 1 license. license upgrades every year and can only use current & -1. I'm assuming servicenow figures this out and then advises on out of compliance if you have an installation that is current - 2. please confirm. 

[dreinhardt]

Hi @Nancy Schilli,

A1: I would like to call the use case described by you almost "standard" when it comes to starting with SAM and gathering all the data. In such cases, we always try to define a baseline together with the customer and the Vendor/Publisher so that data acquisition does not become too complex. If there is any e.g., renewal, contract extension I would use this event as the new baseline. 

From my point of view, you have already described the solution yourself - so that the maintenance extension can be reflected with the available data (maintenance PPN), the creation of a base license (perpetual + maintenance, if necessary, without PPN) is a feasible approach.

A2: I assume that L1 is still valid and with the purchase of L2 the usage rights were extended, and it is not a maintenance extension. Yes, as long as both are active, they are populated with allocations. I always allocate the data from "old to new".  Over-allocation is is not possible and will be blocked by a business rule as soon "Allocations available" is 0

A3: Unfortunately, I only partially understood your question. If the answer does not fit, then formulate again more precisely. Allocations are only available for "Perpetual" & "Perpetual + Maintenance" (Tab User/Device Allocations). When linking maintenance, you've to enter the number of rights which should be extended. As long this is the same amount as for the base license, you'll be compliant. When splitting and do not extend the full amount, ServiceNow will split it into two entitlements. Record software rights for maintenance entitlements (servicenow.com)

Note: If you purchase a perpetual entitlement and associate only some of the rights of that entitlement with a maintenance entitlement, your perpetual entitlement is automatically split into two entitlements. For example, you purchased a perpetual entitlement with 50 active rights (E1). You associate 20 of these rights with 20 rights of a maintenance entitlement. Your E1 perpetual entitlement is now automatically split into two entitlements: one perpetual entitlement (E1) with 20 active rights (and 50 purchase rights) associated with 20 rights of the maintenance entitlement (M1) and another perpetual entitlement (E2) with 30 active rights without any maintenance association and no purchased rights

.  

Best, Dennis