Technically Speaking

In the past few years, IT managers have been forced to keep a very solid count on the applications within their environment compared to the number of copies owned. Auditing has been around since there has been stuff to audit, but the BSA and other organizations are doing their part to ensure that those of us working with licensing know they are around.

I am not saying auditing for internal knowledge of what your organization owns isn’t a good idea, in fact far from it.  I am currently shopping for new tools to aid in keeping an accurate record of what my organization owns against what they are using.  Sure most companies are in compliance when it comes to licensing, but let’s face it, organizations do not run out and get another copy of Office or whatever the app may be when one more user is added to the staff.

Typically, a specific number of licenses are purchased, say 5 or 10 at a time to avoid one off calls to the reseller for another copy of an application and when there is a need for the set minimum copies, another order is placed.

Is this the perfect way to handle licensing, not at all.  Is it recommended? Nope.  However the reality is that there are companies trying to keep up and this is the best way they know how with the budgets they have.

Is it acceptable for an IT manager to refuse to load Office for the new Sales person because they are out of licenses?  Probably not, but should a one off copy be purchased because of the new hire?  Probably not, depending on the budget for IT.  The issue isn’t if an organization will buy the applications they use, in most cases they will.  For me the issue is timing of spend.  If I am working with a budget, I will know when the budget is prepared how much I can spend on licenses early in the year.  Once I have used all allotted monies for applications,  a one off purchase can be quite challenging to handle.

How to manage the audit issues

There are several applications available to help with software counts and tracking, but the most important thing is that the project gets tackled and reviewed regularly.  Since licensing is evolving with every release and companies have to watch their cash more than ever in this economy, knowing where you stand with application licenses could be a great way to invest and save money long term. 

Note: Normally I would review a product to aid with license auditing and compliance, but having not selected on myself I cannot yet provide a review.

We are looking at a couple products:

IQuate – IQ Netscan

GFI – Languard

And I also keep the information I know in an excel spreadsheet.  Hopefully once we have an auditing solution in place, the maintenance of the Excel sheet will be far less intensive.

What to watch for

The biggest thing to keep track of is the number of licenses that your organization owns for each product they use.  So if you have 25 licenses for Office, keeping track of that number and modifying it as more are added is beneficial for sure.

Also, make sure you know how many copies of an application are installed.  This will likely be the hardest task without some help, but getting this number figured out is important.

These two pieces of information will be extremely useful in determining the discrepancy between owned and installed licenses (if any).  This way you can determine how many licenses you’ll need to buy to match the install count. 

Another useful thing to note is the cost per license of the application.  This way you can approximate the cost of the licenses needed and weigh hard numbers against the cost of not being in compliance.  Surly purchasing licensing is more affordable.

Good luck in the realm of License management and hopefully the links and tips provided can help you keep your organization compliant.

With new technology rolling out all the time and changes to hardware becoming faster and more frequent it seems as though companies can quickly fall behind in the race to be leading edge.

Using programs like Microsoft Software Assurance and Open Value can help your organization stay up front with both applications and their licensing which is so important for IT administrators to consider.

I am not a licensing expert – yet.  Hopefully in the near future I will get started down that path, simply to help my organization and others better understand the lengthy and very snooze worthy EULA.

Licensing seems to be the glue that either holds the IT organization together or the frustration that causes early baldness in IT pros all over.  I am not sure why the documents are so hard to comprehend (and yes I know that they really aren’t that bad, but you have to read them).

It seems to me that Microsoft (and other organizations) want to get all the possible scenarios into the license so they do not miss anything or leave any loopholes, which is understandable, but the efforts to do so seem to pull all of the trustworthy out of computing.  If you cannot trust your users and have to put huge license agreements out for all products except Bob (surely all of you have seen MS Bob), most aren’t going to read the EULA anyway.  This does two things:

1. gets the user to agree blindly to the terms laid out in the EULA

2. gets the vendor nowhere in terms of its customers understanding the agreements they put out.

One thing I would like to know is where can one go to find materials to learn about how licensing works not to mention get the EULA for a product before purchasing it?  Sure there are sites and books and blogs about licensing, but what training material is out there for the beast?

I do not have a huge issue with licensing other than trying to learn it.  Really it is there to protect the manufacturer and the user and should be followed, but when I saw the Windows Server 2008 Licensing for Dummies hand out at Tech Ed, it made me wonder why would they need to even joke about a Dummies manual for licensing?

Hopefully licensing gets more user friendly in the future, after all the word user is even in the title of the document.  They aren’t called the IT Professional License Agreement.

Have any of you found a good tactic for learning more about licensing or a way to gain from reading product EULAs?  If so, post in the comments or contact me, I would be interested in finding out how others handle it.

Update: Poll added below

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