Importance of mainatenance & support Contarct data during MLS baseline

[fernands]

I am new to Flexera and am working on deploying FNMS on-prem.

I am currently looking into processing purchases from an MLS to create a baseline for licenses. I would like to understand the importance of having a maintenance/support contract tied to the license when generating the licenses from the purchase. What is the drawback of not linking the maintenance contract? Also if I did not link a maintenance contract, can I generate the license and at a later date when I do have the maintenance and support contract information, link it to the license?

Any guidance/assistance on doing this is appreciated.

Thanks

[Greg_Misso]

Having contract information associated with a baseline MLS import is not imperative. In many cases, the MLS will represent contracts that are 10+ years old and aren't as important as the purchase data itself which identifies the base license and relevant upgrade paths (be that through the old upgrade models eg. VUP, CUP, PUP etc. or via SA renewals). The effort to associate the contracts may not justify or result in any business benefit - but this is something that the organisation will have determine ie. what is important and relevant.

My recommended approach would be to add the current contract to your system and associate all current products with SA (assuming your organisation has an EA) to that contract. You can then manage and associate this contract (and future contracts) to the relevant entitlements and licenses as they are transacted moving forward.

If it is decided that you want to add contract details post entitlement import and license creation, this can be done by manually associating the contract(s) to the relevant license record(s). If there is significant volume, you would want to look at doing this via a business adapter.