License Manager - suite of titles with an 'umbrella' licence

[chrislees]

I am looking at the License Manager and have set up one called ‘Adobe Creative Suite 3’.

It contains 3 lines to match to software items: Adobe Illustrator*, Adobe Photoshop* and Adobe InDesign*.

I have assigned it 500 licenses and already it is reporting that we have 1046 instances of it in use. This is because many machines match it three times. However, a license counts as in use if 1 or more of the titles is installed. If all three are installed on one machine then that is still only one license used.

How should I handle this so that our 365 discovered assets are only using 365 of these licenses?

Is there any way, for example, to show only one line of matching text that looks something like Adobe Illustrator* OR Adobe Photoshop* OR Adobe InDesign*? Ie so that a match only counts once.

Cheers

Chris

[Robin Patenall]

Unfortunately, this type of software licence (one that licences more than one piece of software per machine) is not supported by the Parago system at the present time. The only suggestion that we have is to change the licence type to "user" which will allow you to store the number of licenses you have and find all the software but will not generate an alert when the number of installed pieces of software exceed the number of licences.

I've added this to our internal bug tracking system and it may be better supported in the future.

[chrislees]

I would have thought (and I haven't put a lot of thought into it so I might have missed something really obvious!!!!) that an easy way to achieve it would be to allow not only wildcards in the match field but some kind of pattern matching (regex etc)

Would this be an easy development task to address?

[Parago Software]

Hi Chris,

Under the hood the licence manager converts the wild cards into regex's to match the software titles, the reason for the wild cards is for user simplicity, the majority of our users would not be comfortable with regular expressions and are more likely to be familiar with globbing.

Even if we did allow a regular expression match it wouldn't alleviate this problem, in your case three software titles would still be matched per machine. What is required is another licence type that would treat any groups of matching titles as a single software item.

Most of our development is customer driven and we appreciate the feedback, we do have some SLM work scheduled in the near future, this is something we will be addressing.

Thanks

Chris

[chrislees]

Of course! I was coming at it from the wrong side.

Thanks for the info. Is there any way of being notified of additions other than the front page of the Parago site?

[Parago Software]

No problem Chris, you can sign up for the Parago Newsletter, which covers most of our major developments. These are only quarterly so we won't clog up your inbox.