Retiring Licenses

[jrobs3]

What's the 'best practice" for retiring licenses so they don't show as Under-Consumed. I've been changing the status of the licenses to RETIRED and changing the compliance status to NOT TRACKED but the license shows as Under-Consumed since its not installed anywhere. I don't want to DELETE the license and lose the historical tracking but also don't want to assign consumption where there is none. Suggestions?

[mmarnell]

Hi Jrobs3,

I think I understand what you're asking, but I want to turn it upside down and ask why it is in your favor to retire licenses...

If compliance is your key focus, I think retiring licenses and having only keeping your most current offerings will simplify the picture. You will likely pay for more than you need, but things will be simple and straightforward. However, if optimization is your key focus, it is an advantage to have all the older licenses in the system - and still consuming where they apply - so you are not re-buying licenses at current rates when you have perfectly good ones on the shelf already.

I can understand retiring applications, devices, etc. through decommissions or upgrades. But if you have perpetual licenses that do match existing installations, even if those licenses are somewhat under-consumed, do you really want to remove them from the pool of software assets? Maybe it would be better to find a way to call them out in reports, like adding a suffix to the license name, e.g., "Microsoft Visio 2003 [RETIRED]"?

Regards,
Matt

[jrobs3]

Thanks, Matt. I'm specifically referring to old licenses/apps with no consumption due to upgrade, etc...Currently my Dashboard is indicating we are $7.6M under consumed. Not a good figure for the CIO to see. Yes, I can explain it away but that number should not be there. In fact, I logged a Support Case and evidently it's a known issue (bug) that is corrected in SP3. Thanks again for your response.

[scowherd · Accepted solution]

As a tip I have had some success in a similar a situation what we did was add $0.00 to the override prices for those licenses so the qty stays the same but is multiplied $0.00 so the net is $0.00. May want to give that a try as a workaround .. I also have seen it may take a full inventory cycle for the results to show. As always this should be tested and verified before implementing in to production.

[anne_watson]

Tried that.  Doesn't work.  I even then set the Override to 0.01 in case it didn't like 0.00 - the metric on the dashboard did not budge, no matter how we set the override price.

[mfranz]

Did you run a complete import or at least a complete reconcile after setting the override value?

[anne_watson]

I did.  I even did a couple of before and after comparisons.  Even after changing the Override Unit price, the raw extract of that table showed a considerable difference from my starting number to ending number, but the metric didn't budge at all.

[mfranz]

Are you sure your license is even part of the "over spent" value right now? I cannot get my lab environment to calculate the value for a license I just added.

[anne_watson]

Let's put it this way, i adjusted enough of the licenses that the metric should have gone down significantly.  It did not move one $

[anne_watson]

I went into the Cognos piece to see if i could pinpoint where that number was coming from and there was an SAP license with no Override price.  I put one in - we'll see if that changes it tomorrow.

[anne_watson]

Okay - that worked and it did not require a recon.  Using the Publisher Portfolio Dashboard, i was able to identify the licenses contributing to that number.  It's the licenses that did not have a value in Override that was causing the inflated numbers.  Once i adjusted them, the problem resolved itself.

[anne_watson]

Correction - you should run a recon without bringing in New Inventory, which will update the dashboard

[mfranz]

It looks like only licenses with linked applications are considered in the calculation of the dashboard monetary value. Licenses without apps are still shown in the view "Under-Consumed Licenses".