Any recommendations how to track Licensing Compliance in KACE for Third Party Licenses?
We are looking to possibly move a lot of our company's Third Party licenses into KACE for compliance reasons, but have not been able to figure out the best and simplest way to do this. Looking for Recommendations.
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Posted by:
Hobbsy
6 years ago
There is no real quick way around this, basically you need to create or import the license records that you have, the proof of ownership, as license Assets, but the work in building the CSV for import will take a little while. There are 6 Mandatory fields required in your CSV as a minimum
Asset Name - Make this a Primary Key and make it individual eg include the PO number
License Count
License Mode - Make sure this columns values match the values in your KACE box
Includes Upgrade Rights - Make sure this columns values match the values in your KACE box
Includes Maintenance - Make sure this columns values match the values in your KACE box
Includes Downgrade Rights - Make sure this columns values match the values in your KACE box
And I always recommend you save your CSV in a UTF8 format as it is much less likely to fail the import
Posted by:
chucksteel
6 years ago
We have been slowly working on this, too. Rather than do an import our purchasing agent has been trained on entering the license information and whenever licenses are renewed they are entered into KACE as license assets. As time permits she has also been going back through previous purchase orders and entering those, as well. Once the license assets are created I associate them with the appropriate title from the Software Catalog so that we can start tracking our compliance. A few things of note/tips:
Establish a naming convention first. As Hobbsy noted, the asset names need to be unique.
For titles that are unit licenses (one license for one user/computer) we enter them individually. This could vary based on your environment, but working in Higher Ed. we have some software titles where Prof. A pays for maintenance and Prof. B doesn't, so we need to enter those separately, anyway. We are getting better at avoiding those situations moving forward, but for now we are dealing with past practices. Using separate licenses for these kinds of titles also allows you to assign each license to a specific user, so when a user leaves the institution you can generate a report of all of the assets assigned to that user, and the software licenses will be included.
If you have concurrent use licenses, set the license count to a large number, not the concurrent user limit. Otherwise, KACE will show you as being out of compliance on those titles, since it will be installed on more computers than the license count. Those titles need to be tracked using software metering data (if there isn't a license server doing that for you).
