How to manage changing vendor (Publisher) names?

[rudi_bissels]

For applications (products) and licenses, the publisher name changes overtime due to divestures of acquisitions. After some time the Publisher name of products in the ARL is updated but not always and it is also relevant to know former names of publishers for each product. How does FNMS helps to capture those historical publisher name changes?

[Kevin_Hou]

Hi @rudi_bissels 

In theory, our content library team will proactively make publisher updates once the team notices that accordingly. Of course, if the customer finds something before the team, you are welcome to simply to raise a support team to reach out to our content library team to update the Application publisher name accordingly.   It is quite similar to our content submission request via support case.

HTH

Cheers

Kevin

[rudi_bissels]

Thanks for you reply Kevin,

I am aware of this process and I have good experience with contacting the Content team via cases to update the ARL. My concern is about capturing historical information about changes of publisher names overtime. It would be great if, for example, the notes field of ARL applications contains (a list of) former publisher names. This way not every user of FNMS needs to create an administration of Publisher Facts like this.

Cheers,

Rudi

[rudi_bissels]

Since there has been no reponse to my last post. Should I raise an Idea?

[Resnofendri · Accepted solution]

Hi @rudi_bissels,

Thank you for raising this question.

We have actually had an established process to track what we call 'lineage changes' in our Technopedia library. Name changes and/or product ownership changes will trigger a process to create new product entries which would then linked to the old entries in the lineage tables (product or release lineage).

Unfortunately, ARL doesn't currently have the ability to capture this lineage concept. The good news is we are unifying our Flexera library into Technopedia where ARL is being generated from the same content pipeline as Technopedia. Lineage is one of the remaining details that we need to figure out on how to model it properly in FNMS.

In the meantime, we publish what we call 'Content Change Notification' on our Technopedia Blog, which provides advanced notification to our customers of any upcoming major lineage changes. You can utilize these notifications to help tracking publisher and product name changes.

I do recommend you raise this request on our Idea Portal to get more visibility. With other customers sharing similar needs, it will go a long way in helping us setting the prioritization.

Hope that helps!

-Resno

[rudi_bissels]

Thank you very much Resno for your answer. I have created Idea: https://flexerasfdc.ideas.aha.io/ideas/FNMS-I-185