Snow Best Practice Advice

Updated Best Practice for Large Environments

Hey Snow Globe Community Users!

Not sure that you have seen, we have updated the Best Practice for Large Environments. Very useful for you as it provides best practice guidelines and recommendations for the installation, maintenance, and performance optimization of Snow Software products.

I also like to take the opportunity to promote you to use our Snow Docs portal, this is where you will find documentation to help you install, configure and use Snow Software products.

Kind Regards

Pernilla Lindsten

Snow Software Support

Local Authorities Unite!

Naming Convention for Agreements

Hello guys,

I was wondering if you use any special naming convention to add the contracts / agreements on SLM.

For example:

Vendor acronym or common name - Contract Type - Contract Year - Agreement Number

- > VMware - ELA - 2016 - 9232201 <-

-> MSFT - ...

Trying to define some ground rules to support the growth of the SLM usage.

Thank you all!

Asset Management Best Practices

Some of you already know me, others may know of me, and some of you may be wondering who I am... so a bit about me first: 

I've just joined Snow following 8.5 years as a Gartner analyst leading research into the management of digital technology assets. Prior to that I spent 4.5 years IT Asset Manager at Centrica, and before that I managed IT assets and services for AA Publishing, where my interest in software asset management started as the result of a font audit (before that I edited travel guides and financial text books). 

I'm very excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead of me at Snow, and to that end, I'm reaching out to the community for help. I hope that we will shortly have a dedicated space for discussing best practices, away from the detail of licensing issues or product-specific discussions, but in the meantime I'd like to know what YOU all want to talk about.

Some of the topics that have been suggested so far include:

• ISO 19770-1:2017 - how to use the updated version of the standard (I'll be posting something on the Snow blog about this soon)
• What assets should we be managing? The new ISO standard covers ITAM, not just SAM, but in a world of SaaS, Cloud, IoT & BYoD how do we decide where our responsibilities lie?
• Managing entitlement - how are you approaching both the management of current purchases but also the need to deal with historic data?
• What does good look like? Share your vision of what successful asset management would look like in your organisation. 

I'm sure that there will be lots more suggestions and ideas, and I look forward to hearing them!

Why does my Autodesk Compliance report NOT look like I expect it should?

Managing

a large IT estate often with thousands of workstations and hundreds of software

title is a complex operation. Bringing a tool like Snow License Manager helps

shedding light on the situation.

Often this gives the first corporate wide view on what is installed, what is being used and what assets and licenses are lying dormant. Great! But it’s not.

In most cases the first glimpse is either not properly focused, or is disturbingly skewed.

We have seen first run reporting with compliance showing at 3%, when we’re sure we have the licenses and they should all be in the system. What can explain this? This article gives some common answers, but is by no means exhaustive. I’m also restricting it to Autodesk specific issues but similar thinking can be applied to most software vendors.

Get the basics right

First thing is to understand both your environment and what you have purchased, then have them correctly imported into Snow LM:

1.   Organisation – Do not simply use an AD dump, but create an intelligent presentation of your entire organisation, optimised for software and license management. Remember that different vendors pose vastly different criteria.

2.   Discovery – Are all your PC’s reporting to Snow, using up-to-date agents and all the necessary scripts? If not, none of your reports won’t be accurate.

3.   Agreements – Have you got current entitlement data and checked that all your software titles are registered with the vendor? If not, you should update the data as soon as possible. Incomplete data renders all subsequent reports incomplete.

4.   Licenses – Are all your licenses correctly loaded to appropriate agreements, with accurate dates for maintenance contracts, restricted to correct OU and/or users? If not, you’re going to end up with large compliance cost figure and many unassigned users. Or worse yet all licenses are in a single pool which does not work at all for calculating compliance, Autodesk is very different from Microsoft.

5.   Maintenance and Subscriptions – Pay special attention to agreement valid days. If your master agreement expires, it can render ALL licenses obsolete even if the individual contracts are still valid. Same applies to maintenance periods where stopped upgrade rights can seriously mess up your compliance.

Some common reasons to watch out for Autodesk license rules 

• Rules are not understood or correctly implemented in the estate setup phase 

• Autodesk perpetual licenses are licensed per device or concurrent user. They are restricted per country and per legal entity (operating) company. No cross region or cross company use is allowed unless you have an ETR (Extra Territory Rights) or other corporate wide agreement that allow this. 

• Autodesk subscriptions (rental software) is licensed per user and don’t have similar restrictions. They have, however, exactly same installation footprint on the target PCs which makes a mixed environment extremely difficult to manage IF NOT installed from correct software images obtained from Autodesk’s license management portal for each of your licenses.

Key reasons why your Autodesk compliance might not be accurate 

1.   Autodesk software package installed from incorrect build most common problems:

• standalone installation using network licenses 

• trial software not removed before commercial use begins 

• bundle component installed separately, not as bundle 

• check installation type 

2.   Entitlement data old or incomplete 

• Not all agreements and licenses counted for 

• Expired contracts will reduce compliance, even if you have correct licenses 

3.   Incorrect License data 

• Licenses are not uploaded correctly 

• Licenses are not restricted to correct OU or users 

• License metric is wrong 

4.   Licence allocation issues

• one of the most common problems 

• OU/Country/Operating Company 

• User type incorrect 

5.   Agreement or maintenance periods missing, expired or wrong

• any erroneous period will reduce your compliance, even if you have the licenses 

• watch out for master contact expiring before individual subscriptions or software maintenance contracts 

• maintenance periods not correctly imported to agreement data 

• maintenance period expired 

6.   Subscription periods missing, expired or wrong 

• subscription periods not correctly imported to agreement data 

• subscription period expired 

• subscription types wrong 

7.   Upgrade/downgrade rights 

• make sure you’re edited all your applications with correct upgrade/downgrade rights 

• if a (perpetual) license has active maintenance contract the downgrade rights are “Current + 3x”, i.e. you can have the current and any of the previous three versions installed at the same time 

• if you’re maintenance contract for a license has expired, you’re allowed only the latest installed version remain on the computer and ALL other versions removed within 120 days 

• Different rights apply to software subscriptions 

8.   Cross edition rights 

• allow higher value bundle to downgrade so licenses are consumed in the most cost-effective order 

• remember to tick the correct box to allow cross edition rights where applicable 

• works from higher to lower, i.e. Ultimate > Premium > Standard 

9.   Bundle behaviour 

• bundle components installed separately, hence not recognised as “part of bundle” 

• this leads to increased license requirement and unconsumed bundle licenses 

10. Discovery data issues 

• sometimes the discovery either misses some information or reports it incorrectly 

• this can result from a variety of conditions, including old agent version, old OS not supporting current PowerShell version, Autodesk scripts not working correctly 

• if you suspect this, report it back to Snow and we will our best to examine and remedy the issue.