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License relationship with user and device

Good-day everyone!

I would like to know if it is possible to relate a specific license to a device and user for all types of licenses. 

The main reason for this requirement is to make possible to:

1. identify who is the owner of the license that is being used/consumed for a specific software installation on a given device

2. where (which device) the license of a particular user is being consumed.

Thanks in advance for your attention.

(1) Solution

@Tiago_Duarte 

It's quite rare to purchase licenses individually, i.e. device based (license metric wise) licenses are often purchased in bulk (hundreds, thousands, etc.)

The design idea of FNMS is therefore to focus on what's required license compliance and optimization wise first, and then potentially facilitate customer internal specific use cases and internal reporting requirements secondary. It's also a good ITAM/SAM practice to merely administer licenses at the granularity level required to facilitate external compliance as well as internal optimization use cases to avoid administrative overhead.

You would as such potentially just register the licenses with a quantity acquired as and when purchased/subscribed to, and then it's a matter of counting the numbers rather than administer this at the individual device/user level. You can still potentially report on both devices and users consumption of (device based) licenses through FNMS as devices and users can be linked to each other by registering 'Assigned user', 'Calculated user' or 'Last logged on user' per device; or you can do proper hardware asset management and link the device to a hardware asset, and then process wise link the hardware assets to users throughout their life cycles.

Just some ideas...

Thanks,

View solution in original post

(5) Replies
mfranz
By Level 17 Champion
Level 17 Champion

Hi,

That won't work with FNMS. There is no owner of an installation. It's more like the device is an attribute of the installation and user is an attribute of the device. Tracking single installations is not really feasible with FNMS.

Best regards,

Markward

@mfranz thanks for your quick reply. 

Sorry for the silly question, but what is the concept of FNMS about that point? FNMS just compares the software installation against the number of owned license by a company? 

Can you please provide more directions on that? 

Thanks (again) in advance.

Hi,

Yes, I know other SAM tools run a more "rigid" way of assigning users/devices/licenses. I would call the FNMS approach more fluid, more dynamic.

A single installation is basically as good as another installation on another device (linked to anotehr user). Sure, there might be constraints, like this device belongs to this corporate unit, or that device has a "test" role or this license is limited to that location. So these things might impact how licenses are consumed. FNMS is taking all these things into consideration when processing the license position. This way, you can set up all the rules and FNMS can apply them to changing situations/inventory. I think, this scales way better, than applying these rules manually.

I did completely understand your initial use case. Maybe you can explain the license metric a bit more in detail?

Best regards,

Markward

The requirements below are because in my company it is as the user "owns" the licenses so I cant user his license to another specific installation from this same software and I have being asked to keep these relationships (license/user/device) to better managed it.

 

1. identify who is the owner of the license that is being used/consumed for a specific software installation on a given device

2. where (which device) the license of a particular user is being consumed.

@Tiago_Duarte 

It's quite rare to purchase licenses individually, i.e. device based (license metric wise) licenses are often purchased in bulk (hundreds, thousands, etc.)

The design idea of FNMS is therefore to focus on what's required license compliance and optimization wise first, and then potentially facilitate customer internal specific use cases and internal reporting requirements secondary. It's also a good ITAM/SAM practice to merely administer licenses at the granularity level required to facilitate external compliance as well as internal optimization use cases to avoid administrative overhead.

You would as such potentially just register the licenses with a quantity acquired as and when purchased/subscribed to, and then it's a matter of counting the numbers rather than administer this at the individual device/user level. You can still potentially report on both devices and users consumption of (device based) licenses through FNMS as devices and users can be linked to each other by registering 'Assigned user', 'Calculated user' or 'Last logged on user' per device; or you can do proper hardware asset management and link the device to a hardware asset, and then process wise link the hardware assets to users throughout their life cycles.

Just some ideas...

Thanks,