Best practices for managing license keys

[gcarson]

Hello all,

Our company has been using FNMS for about 18 months.  We are still trying to figure out our best practices and one of those is how to handle license keys that are needed for one-off software purchases or more personal productivity software.  These installs are handled by our Service Desk & PC Technicians which currently do not have access to our instance of FNMS.   

Right now, they keep the software that they install in Flexera App Portal and I think they actually keep their license keys in a spreadsheet.  We are trying to make a new process for these small software installs that will assist them but not create more work for the SAM team by having to keep up with the license keys for them.  

I'm just interested to see how other companies deal with this process?

Thanks!

[mfranz]

Hi,

I see 2 options:

1. Have the Service Desk & PC Technicians use FNMS to track the keys
2. Create a business import to load the data from the existing spreadsheets into FNMS

Best regards,

Markward

[gcarson]

Thanks for the reply mfranz.  Can you, or anyone else, point me in the direction of the Flexnet Manager documentation that speaks about managing license keys in FNMS?  I am still a little new to FNMS and since our team has never managed the keys in there, I would like to read about the capabilities it has to do this.

Thanks!

[mfranz]

Hi,

There is a video on this in the learning portal: https://learn.flexera.com/license-creation-optimization-with-flexnet-manager-suite/303379

License Creation & Optimization with FlexNet Manager > Reconcile, Review & Improve your License Position > License Keys

Also the online help has something: https://docs.flexera.com/FlexNetManagerSuite2019R2/EN/WebHelp/index.html#topics/LicKey-ManagingLicenseKeys.html

Best regards,

Markward

[bibek9891]

Hi,

Is there any other way we can either hide license key column, so that not everyone will be able to see the keys, or create a new role where license keys are not visible..

Any suggestions on it will be great help. i am just trying to figure out the way we can keep our license key on FNMS portal securely rather than keeping it in a spreedsheet.

Thanks and Regards

Bibek yadav

[kclausen]

@bibek9891 - Anyone who has access to "Read/View" a software license will be able to see the assigned License Keys.

Anyone who is not granted access to "Read/View" software licenses will not be able to see the License Keys.

FlexNet Manager does not have any low level security access rights to say "This person can view a license but cannot view the license keys".

[nandinisapru]

hello, i would like to know if we can use FNMS to detect which key is being used on which end point machine. 

i can see that we can store keys in the entitlements, but can we see keys as per usage/consumption?

[kclausen]

@nandinisapru - Since software publishers want to protect their property, License Key values are typically hidden and/or encrypted when a License Key is entered when installing software.  Therefore, it makes it almost impossible for a discovery tool to capture License Keys when performing an inventory scan on a computer to determine what license keys a specific end point is using.