Does Asset Management manage third-party software licenses?

Products

• Asset Management Solution

Issue/Introduction

Does Asset Management manage third-party software licenses, such as for Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Word, etc.?

Resolution

This question is a little complicated to answer in that it must first be understood what Asset Management does and does not do in regards to software licenses:
 

• Asset Management provide software compliancy reporting based on the number of third party software installations found by the inventory process (which is controlled by Inventory Solution, primarily, not Asset Management) compared to the a software purchase and its license count as configured by Asset Management. Note: Asset Management does not track license keys, only installed software versus Asset license counts. A customization is possible to partially facilitate this, however, and can be found in the following related article:
  
  KB Adding software product license keys to an Asset Management Software Purchase or Computer as a custom data class
   
• Altiris software licenses (such as for Inventory Solution, Patch Management Solution, etc.) that are consumed by the computer are released for reuse by Altiris when the computer is retired in the Symantec Management Platform Console.
• Third party software licenses (such as for Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Word, etc.)  that are consumed by the computer are not released for reuse by Altiris when the computer is retired in the Symantec Management Platform Console. This is because Asset Management does not manage third party license consumption as it is not a third party software licensing server.
  
  The question can then be, "How can third party licenses (such as for Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Word, etc.) be released?"
  
  As Asset Management does not manage third party license consumption, the customer would therefore need to provide their own method of managing their third party licenses on their computers. For example, uninstall Microsoft Word to release its license consumption on a computer, if that is the process to do so.
  
  Insofar as Asset Management's license compliancy is concerned, what then needs to happen is that inventory must be updated to show that one less computer that has a specific third party product is no longer showing that it has that in its inventory data. Once that's updated, license compliancy will be updated too to show the correct amounts. This can be done in several different ways in Altiris:
  
  1. If the computer is to be retired, run the CMDB task "Inventory Clean Up". This will remove all Inventory Solution data from the targeted list of computers.
  
  Or,
  
  2. If the computer is not to be retired, uninstall through what ever normal means, the specific third party product, so that it releases its license. Then, the next time the inventory data is updated in Altiris, this will revise the total count of installations for the specific third party product.

Additional Information

Related Articles

Best Practices for Retiring Computers

Using the CMDB task "Inventory Clean Up"