In most of the cases, it is a repetitive and cumbersome process of
1. creating catalog products
2. then create license products with the same manufacturer/prodname/version as the catalog product
3. then create entitlement within the license products
4. then reconcile the two
If there's an upgrade chain, things are even worse: the license product version remains unfilled, while the entitlement will get the prodname+version in the description field
Either the representation of the product licenses should be revised or at least some steps should be automatized. One way of doing this is to get the old ZAM feature back of creating license records (now called entitlements) automatically from catalog products and auto-reconcile them to each other.
One thing needs to be figured out: how to decide whether inventory or manual consumption should be used when creating the entitlement (because changing between the two is not currently possible)
by: János N. | over a year ago | Purchase management
Comments
I'm not sure about this one, since one of the nice bits of automation in ZAM is the ability to import reseller purchase data. The ability to do this long-term is predicated on allowing the catalog product strings (manufacturer, product name, version) to come in from the reseller feed as represented by the reseller. These strings will almost never match the strings from Discovered Products which match up with inventory. As such, using Discovered Products during auto-recocile creates clean, consistent licensed product names.
I get asked during training and implementations whether the imported catalog products should be cleaned up to have "pretty" names that would allow auto-reconcile to work. I strongly encourage customers against this.
If the intended workflow is to manually import all purchasing data and catalog products, surely this is a far more work-intensive way of going about things than:
1) importing the purchasing data with no editing
2) auto-reconcile to create licensed products with entitlements based on Discovered Products
3) Manually reconcile the entitlements to the imported catalog products.
Now, if someone wants to discuss the idea of adding "aliases" to catalog products that look "pretty" and will auto-reconcile better, that could be interesting. Implementing a reseller SKU database could also do this quite nicely.