Known Issues for FlexNet Manager Platform 9.1

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Summary

This article contains a list of limitations and known issues in the FlexNet Manager Platform 9.1 release.

Symptoms

This article contains a list of limitations and known issues in the FlexNet Manager Platform 9.1 release.

It is composed of four sections

?FlexNet Manager Platform limitations

?FlexNet Manager Platform known issues

?Deployment Manager limitations

?Deployment Manager known issues

FlexNet Manager Platform limitations

Browsers supported for business portal

The business portal supports Internet Explorer 6, service packs 2 and 3. It is expected that Internet Explorer has been patched with all the available security bulletins.

Contract hierarchy in the business portal

The contract hierarchy in the business portal has a reduced set of advanced features compared to the other areas of the business portal. The user may not search, filter, group or export to CSV files in the contract hierarchy. These features are available elsewhere in the portal.

Application Recognition Library report must be viewed in Reporting Services

When viewed through the FlexNet Manager Platform portal or the business portal, the Application Recognition Library Update Summary report does not appear correctly when running SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2. This report should be viewed in Reporting Services.

The FlexNet Manager Platform portal and the business portal provide a link above each report to view it in Reporting Services.

Security overrides

The 8.4 release introduced security at the level of individual contracts. A user may be granted access to a specific contract in spite of the fact that they have been denied access to all other contracts in the system. In this case that user will not be able to link enterprise groups to the contract, although they will be able to make other changes.
If the user has been granted read access to contracts, then the problem listed above will not occur. This issue only exists when a user has been explicitly denied access to the contract feature of FlexNet Manager Platform.

Task support

Contract terms and conditions now list tasks associated with them. This release supports a maximum of 80,000 tasks in the system.

The latest version of the application recognition library must be installed immediately after product installation

The Application Recognition Library must be installed immediately after installing FlexNet Manager Platform. This must be done regardless of whether a fresh install is being performed or whether an existing system is being upgraded.

Upgrading installations older than 8.0 which are installed on a named Microsoft SQL Server instance

Running the FlexNet Manager Platform database on a named Microsoft SQL Server instances was added as a supported configuration in Enterprise Compliance Manager 8.0. It was possible to configure the product to work in this environment in earlier releases, but required customization.

Because of the fact that earlier releases required customization to install, migration from these releases to this release requires additional work. The registration of the reports will not succeed in this scenario, so the reports must be registered manually as described in the Installation PDF document for FlexNet Manager Platform Chapter 7. When registering the reports, ensure that the mgsDataServerName argument is in the form of '-v mgsDataServerName <servername>\<database instance name>'. This will then correctly recognize your database location.

After reregistering the reports, as described, the product will function as desired.

Installing FlexNet Manager Platform with no user interaction

When performing a MSI silent install, use the following command line:

setup.exe /W /S /v"/qn ALLUSERS=1"

This ensures that the installation is correctly installed for all users. No special command line needs to be used for an installation that involves user interaction (a non-quiet install)

Installing on Windows Server 2008 with 64-bit processors

See article M100922 for instructions on installing and configuring FlexNet Manager Platform on a 64-bit server running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

Viewing JPEG documents on Windows Server 2008

When opening an attached related document on the Documents tab of a software license, contract, purchase order or purchase order line and with a file type of either jpg or jpeg, nothing happens, or a warning message is encountered.

See article M100918 for instructions on installing a default image viewer on Windows Server 2008, so that images attached to FlexNet Manager Platform objects can be viewed.

Refresh time when linking licenses

When performing an action in the Link Licenses UI, such as accepting a purchase order line item for processing or deferring a purchase order line item, the entire list is refreshed. For large numbers of line items (70,000 or more), this refresh can take several minutes.

This is to ensure that all remaining purchase order line items are up to date, as the processing of one line item can change the default processing action of other line items.

SQL Server configuration requirements

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 support a SQL Server 2000 compatibility preference on each database. FlexNet Manager Platform is not compatible with this setting and will not function when the FlexNet Manager Platform database is in this mode.

In addition, FlexNet Manager Platform must be installed on a case-insensitive and accent-sensitive SQL Server and database.

Application usage tracking prolonged heartbeat

FlexNet Manager Platform is able to use application usage data collected from a sample set of computers to project the application usage of your entire organization. To determine if a computer is in this sample set, FlexNet Manager Platform tracks a special "heartbeat" application that can only be tracked by those computers.

When a computer is removed from the sample set of computers, it will take up to a month for FlexNet Manager Platform to detect that the computer is not in the sample set. If an application is newly tracked within this period, FlexNet Manager Platform will determine that the application is not being used on this computer.

Compatibility with Deployment Manager for activation of application usage tracking

With the Deployment Manager component, application usage can only be activated by FlexNet Manager Platform on Deployment Manager release 7.9 and later. Earlier releases of Deployment Manager do not support regular expressions when specifying file paths, which FlexNet Manager Platform needs in order to track files anywhere on disk.

Using the system while performing bulk imports of data

When importing inventory data, the database will be busy and may cause performance degradation for users of the system, particularly in large implementations. The scheduled task that runs the import process should be scheduled for a time that will have minimum impact on users.

Importing custom properties from CSV files

FlexNet Manager Platform allows users to import data from other systems by importing comma-separated value (CSV) files listing assets, contracts, and so on. However, if you have added additional custom properties to these items, the CSV importer will not recognize them. Please contact your Flexera Software field representative for further assistance.

Exporting data to Microsoft Excel

Complex data structures, such as the data displayed about licenses on the by Application tab of the Licenses page, do not export cleanly to Microsoft Excel. For data such as these, which consists of nested tables of data, exporting to HTML is recommended.

The amount of data that can be exported to a single Excel 2007 workbook is limited to about 120,000 rows. This exact number of rows that can be exported will depend on the number of columns and content of cells in the data to be exported. If exporting a particular data set fails, try removing some columns or filtering the data down to a smaller set first. Restarting FlexNet Manager Platform before exporting a large data set may also help if you have a lot of data loaded on other pages. It is now also possible to export to CSV format as an alternative, which is not subject to the same limitation.

Web browser support for FlexNet Manager Platform reports

FlexNet Manager Platform reports cannot be viewed through Reporting Services using the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The reports are correctly displayed through the FlexNet Manager Platform web portal.

See article M100921 for instructions on making Reporting Services work better with Firefox.

Assigning new enterprise groups to objects in FlexNet Manager Platform

When assigning objects to a new enterprise group it is recommended that no more than 2000 objects are assigned at a time. Reassigning more data than this in a single operation may result in performance degradation.

Editing multiple objects at the same time

FlexNet Manager Platform allows you to edit many objects of the same type at once. When key fields are changed, saving data for multiple objects can be time consuming. It is recommended that no more than 100 objects are edited at once in order to minimize performance degradation.

Level of execution

All installed binary files in FlexNet Manager Platform are executed using the credentials of the current user. The only exceptions that require elevated permissions for installation are setup.exe and MgsPermissions.exe (that is, Vista and Windows 2008 server will ask for confirmation before proceeding).

CSV import

The CSV import functionality uses the "list separator" locale setting from Windows rather than just commas in CSV files. This behavior is consistent with how Microsoft Excel operates. The list separator can be set in your computer's regional settings. To access the list separator in Windows XP, open the Control Panel and select Regional and Language Options. On the Regional Options tab, click Customize. The list separator is configured in the entry second from the bottom. German OSes have this setting configured to semi-colon by default. See
http://extraxinews.blogspot.com/2007/10/system-locale-issues.html for some additional details.

Product launch time

The launch time of the FlexNet Manager Platform console may be extended if the user does not have working connection with the internet. As part of Windows Server 2008 application compatibility and certification, all FlexNet Manager Platform binaries are signed with a digital signature. In order to authenticate this signature, FlexNet Manager Platform connects to the internet each time it launches to verify the signature against the authentication provider VeriSign. If the internet connection is not available FlexNet Manager Platform will continue to function but there may be a delay as it exhausts all efforts to make a connection.

See article M 100956 for instructions on the console loading slowly due to checking certificates.

SAP landscape size

FlexNet Manager for SAP supports a maximum of 120,000 consolidated users and 1,200,000 user accounts per SAP landscape. Where the number of users is larger than this, multiple SAP landscapes should be defined and systems distributed between these landscapes, for example all production systems in one landscape and all development and test systems in another.

FlexNet Manager for SAP security

Security configuration within the SAP section of the web portal requires an operator with Manage access rights access. This access is given to any operator with Administrator access to the Administration product feature, or can be directly assigned. This access right must be configured by FlexNet Manager Platform console using the Manage Access Rights dialog.

Cause

FlexNet Manager Platform known issues

The following issues are known in the FlexNet Manager Platform 9.1 release.

Problem	Description
Access Rights
58666	Groups granted access to DM are incorrectly visible as ECM roles
72107	Multiple Enterprise Groups per role
73245	Review of role to deny access to a scope
78277	Multiple Selection Enterprise scope - Access Rights
79045	"Compliance Admins" role should not be allowed to be removed
ARL Functionality
73488	Central administration of ARL in hosted model
77361	SKU/PURL not updating when DB name is not ManageSoft
78752	ARL Recognition.exe through unhandled exception
Console
47723	Many fields on CM entities missing from column choosers for grid display
59349	Using flyout box to enter license publisher is tedious
70931	7.8.6 Filtering ARL grid by "[Clasification] is not blank"
73202	Custom view folders cannot be moved
73369	Bad columns included in custom view created by somebody else
73396	License calculation based on usage data
73455	Error occurs when try to export data from custom view
73728	Exceptions shown when performing operations on out of date records
73838	"Is Blank" view filter does not detect all blank values
73981	Define additional enterprise group hierarchies
74287	Slow expansion of custom view hierarchy
74600	No historical capture of information entered in comments field
74601	Single comment/details location
74603	Single document library/location
76322	Problem when adding custom property to a dialog
76851	When using SQL Auth, end user account is not showing in the history tab
77082	Operators under Roles node jumps to random location
77101	Custom properties are blank in custom views after upgrade
77126	"Blanks" or "Non blanks" filter option has no effect on Asset Linked
77204	Remote console unhandled exception with bad XML data
77301	Access rights issue when attaching documents to Licenses
78965	Unable to list roles through the operator properties flyout box
79262	Custom views that use PurchaseOrderDetail may perform poorly
79268	No way to specify the type of the custom view column for custom property
79288	Filtering section of custom view missing in Bootcamp on retina display
Contract/Vendor/PO
70767	Filter match count in Link Purchase Orders always shows 0
74599	Increase window size for comments/detail entry
78263	When processing SKUs, need the ability to change the PO line type
78733	Total price may be garbage if the PO involves multiple currencies
78959	Contract is created with both expiry date and never expires set
79064	FNMP PO line item properties OK/Cancel buttons off screen
79165	The contract expiry date is not taken into account when link to license
79312	Expired contract is not listed on the ?Lease Expiry? list
79376	Purchase Order Line Manager not updated after edit 9.01 *
79382	Do not change sequence number when editing PO lines *
79386	PO line does not disappear after manually linking a license *
79386	Unhandled exception may occur for PO manually linked to a license *
Database
78852	Large amount of history created when deleting user records
79278	AssetGetMany may perform poorly or block
79318	Custom views containing custom properties may perform poorly
79323	PK_ComplianceComputerTypeProperty migration failure from 8.3->8.4
79393	Data warehouse database security not setup correctly at install time *
Documentation
78603	SKU field in license DDI CSV template not documented
78679	Documentation query on upgrading from 8.4 to 8.5
Enterprise
74024	Maximum length of Enterprise Group name need to be increased
78714	Missing "Click here to load all records" when grouping in Ent Grps
Hardware Assets
52083	Ignore removable drives for hardware change detection
73147	Be able to change asset type after the asset is created
73437	"Discarded" computer with newer inventory than "New" computer
78028	Loading inventory via the All tab may not show all records
79255	Add*PropertyAdvanced sp should also add to ComplianceTranslation
79267	Custom property failure should give a meaningful and specific error
Import
53387	Valid CSV files with line breaks in string values fail to import
55151	CM reporting URL & DB settings are disabled when running on admin server
59520	ECM - Duplicate entries
70925	7.8.5 Importing 20000 assets from a CSV file takes too long.
74195	SQL server standard edition issue after downgrade
77546	Virtual Machines incorrectly linked to old host
77762	VMs on retired hosts not handled properly, duplicated
77977	VM's awaiting inventory do not get merged based on serial number
78253	VMs are not cleaned up by RemoveMissingComputers
78612	More columns in license DDI files are mandatory than is docu