Is there a "best practices" for handling licenses of plugins?

April 12, 2018 at 7:00 AM

There are many plugins from third parties which add features to programs like Adobe Acrobat, Visual Studio, and a plethora of other programs. And the plugin technology is quite different between programs.

According to information I received, SLM does not look for DLLs, which are frequently used in such plugins. Since plugins can represent a large portion of the software asset estate, yet they are often unidentifiable.

Will Snow consider improving this and what are the best practices if not / until then?

StevenCalkins
8 years ago
PowerShell scripts are good for Windows but how are plugins for Mac and Linux managed, do we have some more information about implementing these things too?
Expand Post
- DavidH
  8 years ago
  Hi , I have added a to the ideas board about this now. Feel free to vote :-) Thanks. Regards, David
  Expand Post
StevenCalkins
8 years ago
@Jan: Thank you for your comment. You are of course right. By "large" I do not mean largest, but rather significant. I probably should have used the word "significant". Not every piece of software that is significant is frequent. Key programs may be licensed once, like e.g. NuGet packages and used frequently by internal programmer to generate other software. So indeed such a license is significant and needs to be included in the estate.
Expand Post
StevenCalkins
8 years ago
By plugins for Visual Studio, i am referring to NuGet packages (*.nupkg).
Expand Post
- iankimble
  8 years ago
  Hi Steven, We came across the same scenario and could either turn on scanning the ability of the agent to scan all dll's (not ideal) or utilize a power shell script. We have an in house script that specifically looks for plugins and then creates an output that the snow inventory scanner can pick up. we tailor this script to look for a variety of plugins and dll's
  Expand Post
Community Manager (Flexera Software)
8 years ago
Hi Steven, our Snow Inventory Agent has the ability to carry PowerShell scripts. These can be attached either in the creation process (so they will be implemented to the MSI file and can be distributed as usual) or later attached via Snow Management and Configuration Center (SMACC). To get the right PowerShell script configuration, you might need assistance from your local Services Organization. Please reach out to your Account Manager to get more info. /marcel
Expand Post
Zebigbos
8 years ago
In my experience, plugins are usually detected by registry entries. That works just fine, but there is no way of figuring out if they are used or not, since there often is no executable to run. However, I am interested to know how plugins can represent a large portion of your software estate - its usually the other way around.
Expand Post

Is there a "best practices" for handling licenses of plugins?