Redeploying under-utilized or unused licenses for applications to devices/users where they will be used is on of the best ways for software asset management to return savings to the enterprise. It used to be that if a license were recovered - by device retirement or deinstallation - the fact that the next inventory pass would detect the lack of the installed application on a device would increment the available license count upwards and that would be sufficient to know how many licenses were available.

But, in the last few years, software publishers have started to impose "quarantine periods" - if a license is uninstalled on device A, it may not be installed on another device for a defined period of time. It would be useful if our compliance calculations could take this situation into account and provide a "real compliance" compliance calculation as well as a "potential compliance" position.

It occurs to me that for this to work, a GUID needs to be assigned to each instance for each licensed application in the database, which presents a fairly major change to current under-the-hood workflows, not to mention the database schema.

Not easy but an increasingly valuable and applicable licensing circumstance in the real world.

by: Bruce M. | over a year ago | License compliance