Use the Licenses application to define the entitlements
for each of your customer's software products in accordance with their
license agreements. After you assign your customers to the licenses
for the software they use, you can manage the licenses by individual
customer.
Organizing your licenses by customer
From
the Licenses application, a service provider can manage licenses by
customer, as described in
Assigning a customer to a license.
Typically, a service provider manages software data for numerous customers.
This assigning task helps the service provider manage data related
to specific licensed software by matching its license to the customer
who uses that software. To do so, the service provider assigns the
appropriate customer information to a new or existing software license
record. The following
optional data entry
fields for customer information are provided in the header area of
the Licenses tab:
- Customer
- The name of the customer that you want to assign
to the license.
- Description
- A longer description for the customer name.
- Customer Cost Center
- The customer cost center for the license.
- Customer Charge Account
- The customer charge account for the license. You can add this
customer information if you want to track it.
After assigning your customers to their licenses, you
can then use the license records to distinguish one customer's software
data from another, and generate reports accordingly. You can track
licenses by customer, view all the licenses that belong to a customer,
and run a license audit report by customer.
More about the new customer fields
and lookups
The service provider can take advantage of the customer
fields and lookups that have been added to the Licenses application.
Some examples:
- Search for licenses related to a specific customer
by filtering the licenses record list by customer name.
- Find specific licenses using customer-related search criteria.
Use
table filters, queries, the
Advanced Search window,
the
Select Value window, or other search mechanisms
available on the user interface to find a license based on its associated:
- Customer name
- Customer cost center
- Customer charge account
Using searches allows you to view or update the information
for one, and often multiple, customer-related license records, or
select license records based on the customer search criteria that
you provide.
- When allocating a license to locations, computer assets, or partition
assets, you can specify locations or assets that are associated with
a particular customer.
Allocation is simply a way to divide
up a license's capacity. For example, you might want to allocate license
capacity to locations or assets that belong to a particular customer,
in order to ensure the amount of software that your customer uses
is in accordance with your customer contract. After allocating the
license capacity, you can filter the allocated location or asset capacity
by customer.
You
can allocate a license from the Allocations section on the License
tab. On the Locations, Computer Assets, or Partition Assets tab, click
the Select button at the bottom, click the Filter icon,
specify the name of the customer to search for in the Primary
Customer field, and press Enter.
Make your selection, then click OK to save
it. Complete the Capacity field and save to
finalize your allocation. Alternatively, on the Locations, Computer
Assets, or Partition Assets tab you can click the New Row button,
select the Details Menu icon, click Select
Value, and specify the name of the customer to search
for in the Primary Customer field.
- Find multiple licenses associated with a single customer using
the Customer filter for the record list.
- Specify a customer name to help find
licenses that you want to associate with the current license on the
Related Licenses tab.
- Obtain customer information from license audit reports.
Most of the license audit
reports have a "customer" version of the report that displays information
by customer. When a license is associated with a specific customer,
that license is associated only with the computer system and its software
inventories also associated to that customer.
User restrictions
Customers
who use the Licenses application
can only view or work with the information that they have received
access permissions for. User restrictions are managed by the service provider's
administrator, who can grant access permissions to service provider
employees and customers by using the Security Groups (SP) application.
Some examples of user restrictions follow.
In the Control Desk user
interface, customers can view only the license records that you, as
the service provider, assign to them. For example, each customer
can view only the capacity allocations for a license specific to that
customer. Customers need to be able to see all the licenses that you have allocated
entirely or partially to them, so that they can manage their software
assets as well as to understand how you fulfill your contractual obligations.
When
viewing a row or row details for a license listed in the Licenses
table, a customer who goes to the Customer field
and clicks can see only information
about the customers he or she has access to (typically just the customer's
own information). Similarly, a customer who goes to the Customer field
and clicks can view and select only the names
of the customers he or she has access to.