What processes can be established in License Management
Overview
License Management is designed to support all tasks related to maintaining the license compliance, in other words, documenting reliably that the used software products are licensed. It helps save on license costs and minimize the legal and commercial risks that arise from overlooking laws and company regulations.
Matrix42 License Management identifies the license requirements and compares them with the license inventory. As a result, the license balance is generated, which can be presented in the form of reports. You can use these reports to check whether your company fulfills the compliance directives or not and take measures if necessary.
Processes related directly to License Management
Update from License Intelligence Service (LIS)
Matrix42 License Intelligence Service (LIS) is a cloud service that provides predefined software product templates to help ensure license compliance. It also supplies application fingerprints, which enables the automatic identification of locally installed software products. In addition, LIS contains a database of licenses from available publisher catalogs. It means that when creating a license, you just need to enter a publisher part number (SKU) to retrieve information for the corresponding license from LIS.
LIS is essential for creating license requirements. You can run updates from LIS manually or schedule automatic updates.
To find out more on updating data from LIS, please refer to Updating License Intelligence Service (LIS).
Identifying license requirements
License requirements are records that document the fact that a relevant consumer requires a certain amount of valid licenses for a software product in order to be legally entitled to use the software product. As a rule, license requirements are created automatically by the system. The system uses the following five types of foundations:
- Local installations
- Remote usage
- Group memberships
- License requirement rules
- Service bookings
Depending on each software product and specifics of its usage, you can configure on which foundation the license requirements will be based. Once you have provided the required input data, the process of creating license requirements will be automatic.
By default all newly created license requirements must be explicitly confirmed by a user. However, you can configure the system to confirm them automatically for all software products or for some software products.
As soon as license requirements are confirmed, they will be considered for automatic entitlement by licenses.
For more details on setting up the automatic creation of license requirements, please refer to License requirements.
Entitlement of license requirements
You do not need to match license requirements to available licenses manually. The system always does it automatically. If license requirements have been identified and confirmed, they will be assigned to corresponding licenses. You can control the assignment of licenses by defining the availability of each license via the Set License Pool action.
In addition, compliance company codes can be created to manage license compliance separately for individual divisions.
To understand how the system entitles license requirements with licenses, go to Logic behind license entitlement.
Integration with Service Catalog
Identifying license requirements based on assigned services
You can link software products to services from Service Catalog. In this case, whenever a service booking is created, the system will also create a license requirement for the linked software product.
This way, you can manage license compliance for software products that are installed on devices via Service Catalog and Self Service Portal.
Refer to License requirements created from Service Catalog bookings for guidance on how to set up the automatic creation of license requirements from assigned services.
For more details on installing software products via Service Catalog, please refer to Provisioning process.
Integration with Contract Management
Starting the requisition process for software products
By using the Request Requisition action for a software product, you can set in motion the process of purchasing usage rights for a software product. This process is then managed by Contract Management.