How to document software that true-up or can be over-allocated

[Claire Ashdown1]

Hello,

We have a couple of cases where software can be over-allocated, and I am trying to understand the best way to document these entitlements.

Example #1: A software product by publisher A uses a concurrent license metric group of 400 licenses, but 800 users have requested access to the software. Only 400 can use it at a time and we want to document the 400 concurrent licenses purchased, but also want to have the 800 allocations documented. How would we do that?

Example #2: A software product by publisher B can be over-allocated without fear of compliance issues because we automatically true-up at regular intervals. We want to document the 200 rights we purchased, but also document the 250 users who currently have access to the software before the true-up time occurs. We can't create an entitlement for the 50 true-up rights yet because they have not been purchased yet. How would we do that?

In both cases, my assumption as the developer supporting SAM is to create an entitlement with the correct number of purchased rights, cost information, etc...., and then also have an unlimited rights entitlement under the same software model to handle the "overflow" users. However, this is a custom solution not reflected in the "Procurement Process Flow - Auto allocation enabled" workflow, and with the licensing situations in examples #1 and #2 being common across other organizations, I would like to understand what ServiceNow's OOB intention to support that licensing situation is, or if there is no built-in OOB support, what other customers have tried. My concerns with our proposed method are that the products will look to always be compliant with an unlimited number of installs when maybe that isn't the case, or that cost information will be thrown off.

Many thanks for your input and ideas.