Tasks to Manage Expiring Software Licences

[Robert80]

Hello, may I please get some guidance in relation to using our SAM Professional subscription to manage expiring licenses.

The outcome I'm trying to achieve is to generate an alert or a task which prompts someone to consider whether the license/maintenance needs to be renewed and the  drive a workflow from there.

I've noticed the Software Asset Workspace has a widget for expiring maintenance but the number isn't updating.

Should I be looking elsewhere for this functionality such as the contract module?

Best regards 

Robert

[armandosanchez · Accepted solution]

Hi Robert

     Contract module is the option that can solve your problem, you can tie entitlements with the contract module and the contract module can be set up to send a warning for you, in our case, we start to review our renewal with 120 day before to expire, and you can create a Dashboard to track the contracts when reach 120, 90,60,30 days before to expire.

  Due entitlements and Contract are tied, its very easy to know the contact information from the Entitlements and its easy to see which assets are covered by the contracts too, in contract module you can define the product owner and who need to approve the renewal and when using Contract Task sending an email to the approver keeping the approval history.

in my experience is a good module to control and track the renewals no matter if its Software or Hardware.

I hope this info can help

Regards

[Robert80]

Thanks Armando!

[Daniel Slocum]

Hi Robert,

@armandosanchez has this correct. Every contract has an "assets covered by" related list. SW Entitlement records are stored in the alm_license table and are considered assets making them easy to link to contracts. Contracts have default notifications when expirations are approaching. You'd simply want to validate those notifications meet your needs.

Please mark Armando's reply as correct.  He nailed it and was quick to reply.

My purpose in replying is to ask you to open a Support Case if the SAM Workspace widget isn't working after you've tied some of your entitlements to your maintenance contracts.

[Mike Whalley]

Robert,

I've encountered exactly the same issue (in Rome). This dashboard calculation is based on "maintenance end date" NOT on the "end date" entered on the software entitlement record. "Maintenance end date" is populated when SAM - Subscription Maintenance job runs and is only populated for certain license types (e.g. P&SA, P&M but not for "Perpetual" or "Upgrade"). However, I established that the SAM - Subscription Maintenance job wasn't populating the "Maintenance End Date" field and ServiceNow Support provided me with a modified script which resulted in the widget populating correctly.

Cheers, Mike.