Content Change Notification - ARL and Technopedia Eligibility and Coverage Updates

[bcurran1]

Change Title	ARL and Technopedia Eligibility and Coverage Updates	Class 1	Customers should be prepared and take action
Change Summary	In order to provide consistent, curated, high quality software and hardware coverage, Flexera will be aligning coverage eligibility criteria between Technopedia and the Application Recognition Library (ARL).   We plan to remove numerous applications from the ARL that should not have been created as independent products under either existing or proposed eligibility criteria. In addition, we plan to add numerous software releases to Technopedia to increase coverage of relevant software. Finally, we will be making a technical update to Technopedia hardware eligibility criteria in order to clearly communicate that we no longer curate hardware products in separate industry-vertical-specific subscriptions. We are planning to begin making these changes on January 24, and plan to publish the updated eligibility criteria and proposed applications for the first phase of ARL cleanup and deletion by January 10.
Impact	These changes will impact all customers of Technopedia (including Flexera One, IT Visibility, and Data Platform customers) as well as all customers of FlexNet Manager Suite (both Cloud and On-Premises). Flexera plans to update the Technopedia software eligibility criteria and apply a single set of eligibility criteria to both Technopedia and the ARL. This is required in order to provide all our customers with unified, consistent, curated, high-quality software normalization. While investigating unification, we recognized that the ARL has been inconsistently curated historically. Numerous drivers, updates, patches, fixes, and other artifacts have been added to the ARL, while other similar items were correctly ruled ineligible for inclusion. This inconsistency makes coverage unpredictable and not aligned with normalization in other Flexera solutions. On the other hand, Technopedia does not have the same level of current coverage as the ARL for open source software, games, and beta or prerelease software. In order to unify and focus coverage and normalization results, Flexera plans to 1) remove ineligible ARL applications and 2) add newly eligible Technopedia releases that match eligible ARL applications. We will mark evidence for the removed ARL applications as “ignored” so that you do not experience any spike in unrecognized evidence. (Certain exceptions may occur as we review affected applications.) The Technopedia software eligibility criteria are currently documented here: https://community.flexera.com/t5/Data-Platform-Knowledge-Base/Technopedia-Software-Eligibility/ta-p/548 No ARL eligibility criteria are formally documented in the Knowledge Base today. In addition, we no longer manage Technopedia hardware content in industry-specific subscriptions, but instead provide a centralized catalog. We will be making a small update to Technopedia hardware content to reflect this change. The Technopedia hardware eligibility criteria are currently documented here: https://community.flexera.com/t5/Data-Platform-Knowledge-Base/Technopedia-Hardware-Eligibility/ta-p/544 The attached spreadsheet Sample_ARL_for_removal.xlsx provides a sample list of ARL applications proposed for deletion beginning on January 25. Next Steps: You should be prepared for changes in your metrics, KPIs, or other indicators pertaining to the number of recognized software applications, releases, or installations in your Flexera environment due to changes in the underlying content libraries. While we are always adding new applications, deletions from the ARL have historically been rare and may cause unexpected results in analysis if not accounted for. Technopedia customers will likely not see deletions as a result of this alignment but will experience similar changes in metrics or KPIs due to the addition of open source, game, and beta/prerelease software releases. No commercial applications or applications linked to SKU, PURL, or bundle content will be deleted as part of this alignment and refocus. As we continue to apply the updated criteria going forward, we plan to continue ARL refurbishment and cleanup for several release cycles, and will provide further updates on applications planned for removal. We welcome your feedback on these changes!