Creating contracts and license certificates
The following figure shows a software contract from supplier (vendor) Eznet for Microsoft Products:
Software contract
Individual purchases of licenses are tracked by license certificates. These license certificates are related to a software contract. A license certificate can only be part of only one software contract.
License certificates are usually for a product or a suite or a package. In version 7.5 you can only handle one product for each certificate; however, if you want to handle all the versions of a certain product you would leave the Version Number field blank. Version 7.6 or higher, however, can handle multiple products or versions, for example, to satisfy the upgrade or downgrade of software. If a software license has downgrade rights, the new and the lower market version should be specified on the same certificate.
The following figure shows products with manufacturer "Microsoft Corporation" and Product name "Microsoft Visio." Because there is no version defined, it covers all the versions of Microsoft Visio products.
License certificate
Typically, as incremental purchases of licenses are done over a period of time, each product could have multiple certificates. These license certificates should be grouped together for a roll up view and for the SWLM engine to connect related product software's to them. This is termed as Grouping of certificates and is essential as it allows a roll up view of the licenses of product that are in use and that are available. This also helps with the maintainability of the certificates and the products.
The following figure shows a sample Master certificate that groups multiple license certificates.
Grouped certificates
If multiple certificates of the same product are not grouped, the SWLM engine flags them as exceptions. Certificates need to be setup with the right License Model based on the terms of contract.
You can use the Related Product Categorizations feature to relate the various products that the certificate covers. The certificate covers multiples versions of a product. For example, Allen Allbrook in Calbro Services has a certificate for Visio that covers all the versions numbers of Visio. Allen adds a product categorization with Manufacturer = Microsoft Corporation and Product Name = Visio, and leaves the version and other categorization tiers blank.
To set up related product categorization, the products must exist in the Product Dictionary and must have the Requires Contract option set to Yes; otherwise these products would not be seen from the license certificate and therefore, would not be used. A license certificate can be defined only for products that require a contract and that are in the Product Dictionary.
The following figure shows multiple versions of Visio with the Requires Contract option set to Yes:
Product catalog
When licenses are to be shared within a certain organization structure, certificate grouping should be created at the organization level. The jobs created for these instances should also be created at the organization level and the CI's should be setup with the organization attributes. Only the Master certificate relevant to the organization will be found by the engine and appropriate CI's belonging to the organization are connected.