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Naming conventions for licences

Dear Community members,

I am looking for best practices how to implement a naming convention standard for license name. Please share your experience. My goal is to standardize all license to be named in the same convention, to have consistency in FNMS.  Is licensing convention names are governed by ISO standard ?

Examples:

Publisher name Product Name - Type - Metric (Microsoft Visio Professional - Perpetual - Device)

Publisher Name Product Name - Version -  Metric (Microsoft SQL Server - 2017 - Processor)

etc...

Thank you,

Mantautas.

 

 

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

Hi Mantautas,

As far as I know, naming conventions are usually not defined by standards. All relevant elements should help you distinguish the licenses in FNMS from each other. A few ideas on your example:

  • Leave out the publisher, there is a dedicated field for it.
  • Include Product, Version and Edition
  • Version can sometimes be omited, if the license covers the product spectrum using upgrade/downgrade rights
  • Metric also has a dedicated field in FNMS (License type)
  • Consider additional details like
    • Channel (e.g. Box or Volume)
    • Perpetual or Subscription
    • Scope, for licenses only valid in an area, country or branch of the company

Best regards,

Markward

We provide a recommended License Naming Convention as part of our License Creation and Optimization learning track in the Learning Center available from the link above. The basic form is:
<Publisher> <Product> <Edition> <Version> <Identifying details>

Hi Mantautas,

 

I am quite happy with the naming convention we’re using, therefore I’d like to share it:

 

[Publisher] [Product] [Version] [Edition] [Channel] [Type] [Metric] [OE License Owner] [OE License User]

 

  • Channel: e.g. Volume, Box, OEM
  • Type: L, L+Mnt, Abo, while L+Mnt and Abo have added the current end date --> I find this important to quickly realize, why I have several licenses with otherwise identical attributes. If I wouldn’t add the end date, I would regularly stumble above such licenses and would have to check in each license to realize, that they have different maintenance / subscription end dates (as far as I know, there is no column that helps with that).
  • Metric: yes there is a separate field for it, but if you have some non-standard metrics or you use a Flexera metric that counts right but has a different name for this metric, I find it helpful to see the metric right in the naming.
  • OE License Owner / License User: For us this is extremely important as we have differences in who the license owns and who uses it. The Usage you can restrict with Scoping, but for adding new POs to existing licenses, we need to know from the license name which license to allocate. We use the highest possible organization structure that fits using organization entities. Locations might be relevant for some as well.

 

These are quite a few attributes that Need time to be maintained but for us it works very well.

 

We use the same convention for POs, having more Types like Upgrades or Maintenance only.

 

Btw. thanks to Softline for helping in the creation of the convention.

 

Best regards,

Manuela

Dear Manuela,

I was wondering if you could give several examples from the naming conventions your have provided. Can you send several examples with any random Publisher / Product ?

Thanks

Mantautas.