Harvesting named user licenses and making them available for other users

[TeriStevenson]

I'm not sure if this should be in the FlexNet forum but we are wondering how other companies harvest the named user licenses like Tableau, Acrobat or others.  The harvesting works fine but how are other companies putting the harvested license back to the pool?  

The team who manages the licenses here have to manually reconcile the user/machine the software has been harvested form and then remove that user and deallocate in FlexNet.

It seems like there should be an easier way to accomplish the as it is rather labor intensive with the amount of users we have.

[mfranz]

Hi,

This is all assuming you have FNMS on premises.

I would start with the actual process. If the license harvesting process is still to be defined, or open to be changed, maybe start with some of these questions:

• What does actually define/trigger when a license can be harvested? This might be a user account status change in AD. Or maybe a workflow where users are asked to return licenses no longer needed? Maybe they even do this proactively?
• Where is this information (point above) stored? How can it be accessed? Maybe this is stored in a worklow engine/ticket system and we can get it form a DB?
• How is this data incorporated into existing FNMS workflows? For example: If a user was disbaled in AD and you therefore disabled the user in FNMS, it would automatically exempt that user account from consuming any licenses. Of course, you can also take more active actions, like removing existing allocations.
• Are possibly multiple triggers/sources/logics from above involved, that need to be combined?

There are nearly endless options to automate these things using business imports. This is usually where you would hire some experienced consultants 🙂

Best regards,

Markward

[JohnSorensenDK · Accepted solution]

@TeriStevenson 

Besides the valuable feedback that was provided above my Markward I just wanted you to point you to a couple of other links:

• AD group member query business adapter where Nicolas' reply eludes to how a business adapter querying AD group membership can be used to update the named users linked to an Adobe license
• In Technology Value Optimization for SaaS Applications that we ran a few weeks ago we presented how Flexera SaaS Manager's integration with Adobe Creative Cloud can automate and assist you facilitate some of the related use cases. And similar integration could be accomplished with its Tableau Online integration.

Thanks,

[TeriStevenson]

Thank you - we are in the process of upgrading to version 2020 FNMS and this helps.  I'll pass it along to the team.