What's the "Best" way to reflect Agreements?

Portal User asked a question.

June 6, 2017 at 7:00 AM

Hi All,

I'm looking for help regarding the "Best" way to add Agreements (both new & historical) and linking them to license records. I know there are various way's but I'm curious to see how others have completed it.

Let's take Snow's actual agreement itself. Here is my history....

1) Original purchase in September 2013 for 7500 inventory client licenses

2) This was a 3-year agreement through to 2016

3) In September 2016 I renewed the subscription for 1-year upping the license count to 8000 client licenses.

4) In Feb 2017 I had to purchased 2000 additional licenses taking our tally to 10000 total.

So currently we stand with 10,000 agent licenses.

My question is how do I best represent this within Snow...and i'm sure it'll apply to many of the agreements and licenses I have to populate in the future.

Do I have just one agreement (Subscription) that I change the dates for each year?

How do I represent the historical years from 2013-2016 where I just want them to be visible? Should they be sub-agreements now expired?

When I'm trying to link the original licenses purchased in 2013 the current agreement won't show up as it's 2016-2017?

Help!

Many thanks, Lloyd

Portal User
9 years ago
Hi Mary, One of the drawbacks I've found in the SLM Agreements section, and talking to other Snow customers, they're feeling the same pain, is trying to tie multiple agreements to a license, or hardware for that matter. Using the Snow example above, the Snow licenses will have the perpetual license agreement and a software maintenance agreement they're related to. I can tie multiple license entitlements to an agreement, but I cannot tie a license to multiple agreements.
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- mary.barr1
  9 years ago
  Taylor, Can you give an example of when a license would be governed by more than one agreement in the same point in time please?
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  - Portal User
    9 years ago
    Adobe Acrobat DC Pro - governed by the product use rights/license agreement, Adobe CLP and the software maintenance agreement.
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    mary.barr1
    9 years ago
    Hi Taylor, I would think the management of the PUR inside Snow would be very labor intensive. Are you taking multiple snapshots of it as it changes, with a desire to associate it's terms at the time of the purchase to the purchase itself? I presume it's the same with the CLP's specific terms?
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    Portal User
    9 years ago
    - what is Snow position on how the agreements section should be used and/or used for?
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    mary.barr1
    9 years ago
    ‌, I can't speak as an employee of Snow anymore but my initial comment is what I would recommend as best practice when I did, and what I use now in my own SAM program. Keep in mind a tool is there to support your business in managing your risk. It's really what do you need to manage your risk and how can the tool support your efforts. There's no requirement that everything must be managed inside Snow and, because of the variety and complexity in the world as to what needs to be managed and how, the tool won't be able to help with it all. That's why I was asking about your business need. Once I know what your company is requesting you do then maybe I or someone else in the community know of some way for Snow to get all, most or some of your need addressed.
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mary.barr1
9 years ago
Hi Lloyd, Here are a couple of my mantras Create the agreement and then create the licenses. (That way the agreement is in place for association to the license.) Use the agreement's date range where possible; resort to applying a date range to the license only when necessary. Create historical if you have a business requirement or a risk to manage. Same for keeping that once-current-now-historical data; keep it if you have a requirement, otherwise feel free to consider removing it. There's no Undo in Snow. You get the "Are you sure you want to do this?" and then it's changed. The agreements can have two purposes reflecting an actual agreement/contract (Microsoft, Snow, Adobe) grouping related or similar licenses together (No agreement but you have so many purchases of the same app in quantities of 1s-n-2s you want somewhere to see them all, with ease, in the same view.) Snow does not have an actual contract number but does have a EULA, possibly a Statement of Work (SoW), and version upgrade rights to take advantage of. If your instance is installed in your environment you have perpetual licenses, if hosted you have a subscription. I take it you're the latter with the reference to subscription. Thinking about mantra 2, check the maintenance end date for your 3 purchases. If they're all the same date create the 1 agreement and associate all 3 purchases to the 1 agreement. Otherwise you'll want to consider either multiple agreements that will be rolled 1 master agreement later maintenance on the license records and roll them into a master agreement (aka coterm, coterminate). Using the agreement to manage the version upgrade rights, instead of the license record, means when you extend the subscription 1 more year, you make a change to 1 record. If you have your upgrade rights on 50 licenses, you have to change 50 records to reflect the change. Thinking about mantra 3, if these were perpetual I'd say you'd want your agreement to reflect the 2013 date, since that's where your earliest base license was. Since this is a subscription and, legally, your entitlement no longer exists when the expiry date has passed, you could start your agreement with the most recent purchase dates; using the oldest date as your agreement's start date. NOTE: The most frequent question received about setting up a license record is "Where's my agreement?". The most frequent issue is the purchase date on the license record at the time you're searching for the agreement is the start and end date of the agreement. The purchase date MUST be somewhere within the life of the agreement you're searching for. If the purchase is the day before the agreements start date or after the agreement's end date, the agreement is not a living agreement, in the eyes of the law, which is what Snow's coded to replicate. Something else to consider when looking in the List all agreements. Is to use what Snow calls a publisher-level-grouping record. Create an agreement called Adobe Group that has a very broad date range, I always use 1.1.1990 thru 12.31.2020, no version upgrade rights or subscription no renewal alerts Now associate all your actual Adobe agreements (or other Adobe grouping agreements) as sub-agreements to this grouping record. When you next go to List all agreements, you'll be able to expand and collapse to the publisher level, which give a less cluttered look to the view.
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- Portal User
  9 years ago
  Thanks for answering the question I was about to answer - how to best group my MS licenses under an agreement to minimise the work involved tracking SA expiry. I was thinking of having the MPSA as the top level agreement and then listing purchases in yearly sub agreements (based on when SA expire). Further enhanced by having a "non-SA" sub-agreement for those licenses not purchased with SA, or those where SA has subsequently been dropped That way I can easily get a report of what's in coverage and due to expire. Currently I do this with a spreadsheet but there's an awful lot of manual updating to be done in Snow, particularly for renewals three years down the line.
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