With the recent launch of Flexera One, we will be making some changes to the way customers submit new Ideas via Flexera Ideas. The changes are minimal but reflect the correct categories that will assist us in ensuring your Ideas are being reviewed by the right Product Manager’s, in the right place and within in a timely fashion. From Monday, 15 March, when you submit a new Idea, you will firstly select a Product Line to submit your Idea against, followed by the applicable category.  This is illustrated below: Product Line Categories Flexera One ·     IT Visibility ·     IT Asset Management ·     Cloud Cost Optimization ·     Cloud Migration and Modernization ·     Identity Management ·     User Experience Data Platform Not applicable AdminStudio ·     AdminStudio ·     Workflow Manager Software Vulnerability Management ·     Software Vulnerability Manager ·     Software Vulnerability Research FlexNet Manager Suite On Prem Not applicable Spider Not applicable App Broker / App Portal Not applicable FlexNet Manager for Engineering Apps Not applicable   We do not expect this change to be disruptive to customers.  In fact, we hope this provides a clearer experience, particularly around submissions for FlexNet Manager Suite. Please refer to related Ideas FAQ: What product and category should I submit my Idea to? For further information on the where existing products fit into the products and categories. ... View more

A lot of factors go into making decisions on priority, including, but not limited to (and not in any priority order): Product strategy and direction Voting by our customer community to ascertain demand Direct feedback from customers during contact with our Product Management team. Market trends and competition Coverage across major vendors to cover key use cases Technical feasibility. For example: can we technically engineer a solution to cover the use case. Financial investment assessment Use cases that solve problems for a large customer base Business impact for customers Use cases that serve cross platform interests, especially in the case of Flexera One If you want an update on your Idea at any stage, we encourage customers to either add comments to your Idea for our Product Team to respond to, or work with your Customer Success Manager (if you have one) to seek an update on your behalf. ... View more

Earlier this year Engineering at Flexera embarked on a more focused journey to modernize and integrate our Architecture to enable the formation of a true integrated set of capabilities across our suite of product offerings. We formed a central Architecture team comprising of a group of globally distributed enterprise architects.  They are embedded in each of our Engineering programs, spanning four of our global locations. Next came an Architectural vision coined by our VP of Architecture, aptly named, "One Flexera Architecture", that would take us into the future with a modern cloud-based microservice architecture.  Current products overlap in some areas, use a combination of architectures and technologies. This vision aligns them to remove overlap, utilize common capabilities and enable faster delivery of value to customers once the basics are in place. So, we have a team and a vision, but what next?! The Architecture team made some recommendations of Architectural standards and technologies Engineering teams should be working with. The communication of these standards was delivered both in person in some locations and virtually across all. The teams needed support and resources to implement using the recommended technologies.  This involved sending experienced engineers to various locations to work with teams directly for periods.  Not only has this helped with knowledge transfer but it also built up networks and contacts across our global engineering teams.  But, did we get resistance along the way? Of course! What change doesn't come with a bit of resistance? It’s natural for people to question recommendations and figure out how they fit into the bigger picture.  The intention of defining Architectural standards is to give the engineering delivery teams guidelines and enhance collaboration by ensuring all teams adhere to a common set of tooling.  The teams themselves are empowered to contribute to the recommendations and innovate in their implementations. Now that there's been features delivered in the new One Flexera stack, engineers are seeing the guidelines are helpful and are embracing the change to their way of working. In addition, we've seen an increase in cross geography collaboration, leveraging the experience of the greater whole in solving problems together and ultimately redefining new guidelines that benefit all teams.  And what about standards we haven't decided on? We set up short term task forces, led by a member of the Architecture team and volunteers from the broader Engineering group, to work together to solve Architectural problems around DevOps, security, access management etc.  The outcomes being a set of standards that everyone can use. Everyone can and is encouraged to contribute to the growth of the architecture at Flexera. Like all experiments, we didn't achieve everything we wanted to the first time around, but we're quickly improving on this, learning from our experiences, and applying these learnings to future task forces. And we'll keep doing this into the future. And how do you coordinate across a globally distributed engineering team and get the intended results? Recently we added a program manager to the Architecture team to help with coordinating the architectural roadmap, cross program implementations and work with the enterprise architects around task force coordination.  In addition, we ramped up on transparency and communication as it relates to the implementation of the One Flexera architectural vision. And because the enterprise architects are embedded within teams/programs they have been able to work with teams directly in their designs and implementations. And is it working? It's still reasonably early days, but by all accounts, we're starting to see things coming together and the velocity of engineering teams increasing.  If we continue to employ the principles of continuous improvement, collaboration and transparency we're confident this transformation will be a success.  The future is looking very bright for our customers and Flexerans alike. ... View more

Summary Things you need to know about configuring IBM PVU License post migration to FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R1 Synopsis The 2019 R1 release of FlexNet Manager Suite brings significant improvements in IBM PVU license management, for those who have a license variation from IBM allowing you to use FlexNet Manager Suite for sub-capacity license calculations in place of ILMT (or other IBM tools). (This article does not apply to those not using IBM PVU licenses, or using the licenses with inventory data collected by ILMT). Please make note of the configuration requirements (below) for managing IBM PVU Licensing post migration to FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R1. Discussion The 2019 R1 release of FlexNet Manager Suite brings sweeping improvements in IBM PVU license management, for those who have a license variation from IBM allowing you to use FlexNet Manager Suite for sub-capacity license calculations in place of ILMT (or other IBM tools). (This article does not apply to those not using IBM PVU licenses, or using the licenses with inventory data collected by ILMT). If you are running FlexNet Manager Suite as the source of truth for PVU sub-capacity calculations, be aware that the upgrade to 2019 R1 brings significant changes, both in appearance of the IBM PVU license property sheets, and in the following ways: In the brief hours between the upgrade and your next full compliance calculation (or license reconciliation), the results for IBM PVU licenses (including their compliance status) are not to be used. The change-over from old calculations to the new, nightly reassessment is only completed with that next reconciliation. If you have created custom business adapters for importing data with the Business Importer, and any adapters reference the PeakConsumed property of IBM PVU licenses, each affected business adapter needs redevelopment before it can run again. That property is no longer available, because of changes in peak consumption calculation. For correct consumption calculations, you will need to register your enterprise group locations within the three mandatory IBM regions, and make sure that each device consuming PVU points is 'owned' by the appropriate location. It?s also important now to have a single IBM PVU license per product (or bundle). This may mean some work to merge licenses if, for example, you have previously created separate licenses for each region. For a more in depth description of the changes to PVU licensing with 2019 R1, please ensure you read the Release Notes, available 28 February 2019. ... View more

Summary Hotfix to solve Vendor value being cleared after Office 365 integration Symptoms In FlexNet Manager Suite 2018 R1, software licenses associated with Microsoft Office 365 applications erroneously clear the Publisher and Version fields of the license. Additionally, the hotfix fixes the erroneous records in the database. This hotfix resolves the following Known Issue in the on-premises edition of FlexNet Manager Suite 2018 R1: IOJ-1887671 - Publisher information is lost for Office 365 licenses when writers are run for a second time with 2018 R1 Resolution On-premises customers using FlexNet Manager Suite release 2018 R1 can download and install FlexNet-Manager-Suite-Hotfix-2018R1-04 from the Flexera Software Product and License Center: https://flexeracommunity.force.com/customer/apex/CCDownload Additional Information This hotfix is tracked as IOJ-1888157 / FNMC-1055 ... View more