Unprocessed Purchases, Recommended License

[jiwaniec]

Can anyone tell me what specific criteria Flex uses to come up with the Recommended License suggestion? 90 % of the time those recommendations are incorrect and I would like to see if I can improve that. I am pretty sure the SKU and the license name play a big part but it seems that does not always do the trick.

TIA!

Jim Iwaniec

[pallfrey]

Hello Jim,

The recommended license calculation for unprocessed purchases does indeed have many variables involved. As you not the SKU is indeed heavily involved in this. When a purchase has a known SKU from our Content libraries it will consider licenses in a particular order, with the first matching being the best candidate and any other licenses that match being further candidates. This order is:

1. Licenses to which purchases for the same SKU have been linked previously
2. The license model (this is what is used from the Create a License page) associated with the SKU is then used as follows:
   1. Licenses with the same name as the license model
   2. Licenses covering the same application(s) as the license model, ordered by how close a version/edition match they are.

Purchases with no known SKU follow a similar order but only have the item description to utilize in deriving a recommendation as follows:

1. Licenses to which purchases with the same item description have been linked previously
2. Licenses with the same name as the item description
3. Licenses covering applications with the same name as the item description.

There are then some further common ordering and suitability checks applied to the licenses:

1. Licenses in the same enterprise groups as the purchase are prioritized higher in the recommendations
2. If maintenance is part of the purchase (either it is just maintenance or it is license entitlements plus maintenance), the license is checked for suitability (for example it is better to apply maintenance entitlements to a license with no current maintenance than to a license with current maintenance).

The most reliable recommendations are typically from the previously linked licenses for the same purchase, the other recommendation methods rely on matching that is less likely, especially concerning when we can only use the item description.

Hopefully that has helped clear up the logic here.

Regards,

Peter Allfrey.

[jiwaniec]

Thanks Peter, great information! Follow-up question, is it possible to update the recommendation? Here is an example: PO's for Microsoft Visio 2016 being recognized and recommended appropriately. Now we are getting Visio 2019 with the same SKU and it continues to recommend the 2016 license. Is there a way to update the recommendation so it sees 2019 license as the appropriate license?

Thanks!




Jim Iwaniec, IAITAM - CAMP, CSAM
Assistant Vice President | Compliance Manager, Software Asset Management
p. 651.265.0351 | james.iwaniec@usbank.com



U.S. BANCORP made the following annotations
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Electronic Privacy Notice. This e-mail, and any attachments, contains information that is, or may be, covered by electronic communications privacy laws, and is also confidential and proprietary in nature. If you are not the intended recipient, please be advised that you are legally prohibited from retaining, using, copying, distributing, or otherwise disclosing this information in any manner. Instead, please reply to the sender that you have received this communication in error, and then immediately delete it. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

[pallfrey]

Hello Jim,

Recommendations for purchases can always be re-calculated via selecting them in the Unprocessed Purchases grid and selecting the Recalculate button.

The specific scenario you call out is interesting. I'm not aware of SKUs rolling forward with versions of the software. If they include maintenance then the version they cover up to will increase as upgrades are made available but the base version will typically stay constant. So in your case the 2016 Visio will also cover 2019 Visio via upgrade rights but the basic purchase is still of 2016 Visio so hence we prefer a 2106 Visio license an dthen apply the upgrade rights to it. If you have a specific SKU then we can look into that specific case.

Regards,

Peter Allfrey.