My second post today - I'm on a roll! I have recently learned that Flexera default behavior on agents, and recommended practice by our consultants, is *not* to enable the software usage features within our deployed agents.  So, those data fields in our UI appear with blank values when we look at the "Raw Software Usage" report in the Discovery menu. After 8 years of supporting this customer, however, there is a fair amount of "abandonware" detected as installed applications in our environment.  Having visibility to how long ago an application was used would seem to be valuable in driving conversations around retirement of licenses as well as identifying installations that may require licensing - even if the product is not in use. While our consultant advised that, in a datacenter environment, this feature doesn't work in the same way that it would in an EUC/client environment, he immediately backtracked and considered the example of a licensed product like WinZip where the usage on "jump servers" could really have consequences from a licensing perspective. So, how does one go about assessing the cost/benefit of enabling this feature?  In our case, it's unclear that we could make the change at the beacon level.  We'd likely have to stand up a new project to redeploy and reconfigure the 1.5K or so agents in our environment - meaning time and money. Thanks. ... View more

Seeing the recent announcement about the Veritas/Symantec updates made in FNMS, that has me wondering what best practices folks follow as a broad approach.  In the 8 years we've been running this program, there have been numerous mergers, acquisitions and divestitures of software products - some of which we're really only becoming aware of as we start trying to dig into our Tier 3 application portfolio.  (We're datacenter only, by the way)  Some examples are Dell Software with Quest and KACE, BlueCoat being acquired by Symantec, Brocade going to Broadcom, etc.  Do you all create manual associations with the changing vendor and publisher names, do you ask Flexera content team to build that in the ARL, do you edit legacy purchases?  What is a set of best practices to pursue here? Thanks. ... View more