How are you purchasing and upgrading entitlements?

[calebgardner]

I feel like this shouldn't be that complicated but who knows.... We have SAM Pro in place and we have procurement. Some companies allow you to upgrade your current licensed software at a discounted rate, in this case we are talking about TechSmith Snagit. How are people doing this? I know there is the whole upgrade/downgrade on the entitlements, however, that doesn't help with procurement. The only thing I can think of would be to retire the old entitlement and create a new one at a the discounted rate. Any feedback or help would be appreciated. This is our first one that we are going through all the steps with so I want to ensure we are putting best practices in place from the start.  

[Joe Ryder · Accepted solution]

In the way the SAM Pro training discussed this, the new Entitlement record would be listed as Upgrade in its license type, which would open up the Related Entitlements related list. You would link the two, retiring the old one so active entitlements are not double-counted. Just make sure your downgrade rights apply correctly (I believe TechSmith allows using previous versions after upgrade). The link is important for long-term paper trail of the original purchase, but would only need to be retained based on your internal retention requirements. Publishers like Techsmith typically use upgrades as a reset on perpetual rights or subscriptions, so previous entitlement records are only for reference as you would need for your internal historical relationship tracking.

This might not be best practice as we haven't needed to do this yet, but this is the process we documented from what we understood from the SAM Pro training class.

[calebgardner]

Thank you for the reply! this was helpful and exactly what I needed to know. 

[Daniel Slocum]

Hi Caleb,

jryderMcK has this correct for true upgrades, which seem to be the use case you've presented.  Just adding a bit more detail for the use case of replacing a previous license.  This is where your idea of retiring the old entitlement and creating a new one is what you'd want to do. You would then want to move the allocations, if any, from the old entitlement to the new entitlement as well.