Application Suite Downgrade Rights

[WStephans]

FNMS ARL has Adobe Creative Cloud Suite 2020 as an application suite. If you open the application and view the Suite and Member tab of the Evidence tab, you can see all the individual apps included in the suite as well as set the minimum installation threshold for suite application. This is all well and good.

If you link this 2020 application suite to a license (and have the threshold set to a minimum of 2 applications on the suite) and enable downgrade rights, how will FNMS calculate consumption in the following example?

A device has both Acrobat 2020 installed and Photoshop 2017 installed. Will the downgrade rights account for this "mix" or "crossing" of versions within a single application suite and allow it to consume the license? Or because Photoshop 2017 is not technically linked to the suite, will it not allow consumption?

While this may seem like a very rare case, it is actually quite common. Often users will have the latest version of application A but 1 or 2 versions back of application B.

[ChrisG]

I expect the behavior you will see is:

1. The application and suite recognition process happens first. In the scenario you've described the recognition engine would recognize Adobe Creative Cloud Suite 2020 as installed (assuming at least 2 component applications are individually found to be installed), and also recognize Photoshop 2017 as installed (as that is not one of the component applications making up 2020 of the suite).
2. The license reconciliation process runs after the installations have been identified, and seeks to find an appropriate license to cover each installation. So if the application details on the license you have configured show the license is linked to Photoshop 2017 then that license will be considered as a candidate for covering the installation. However because it is a different version from the Suite, it will be seen as a separate installation that a license is needed for.

[WStephans]

I appreciate the feedback Chris. That is disappointing. From a licensing standpoint, only 1 license (the suite license) should be required. We would basically have to make manually sure each suite contains all possible applications, accounting for downgrade rights. Since these suites can contain dozens of products, that becomes massive!!

This other community post explains the same issue from a few years ago where the user was looking for this enhancement. As they state, managing this manually is a total bear and not really manageable.

https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Forum/FNMS-handling-of-suite-containing-applications/m-p/47524/highlight/false#M210