How to Get Software Compliant?

I have seen lots of question around setting up Software Licensing for compliance purposes. As I have told many people, Software Compliance is not something that you can just grab from Altiris out-of-box. It takes a lot of up front work, but is definitely worth it in the end!

As I continue I will describe the steps to setup each software purchase, software license and how to gather compliance data on the software itself. One item to note before going forward is that if you do not have the Inventory agent running, this needs to be pushed out to your clients to gather the proper software inventory.

All of this is done within the Manage > Asset Management > Resources > Contract Types > Software Licensing portion of the Altiris 6.5 console. (See graphic below.)

Click to view.

Step One: Setting up your Software Purchases.

On each Software Purchase entry there are 3 fields (in my eyes) that are important. For our example, we will use Microsoft Outlook 2007.

1. Product Name,
2. Product Version and
3. Quantity.

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Step Two: Setting up your Software License.

So what is important on the Software License screens...

1. When you create your Software license the License Type fields needs to be selected from the drop down for proper license counting. This is on the General Tab. For our example, Microsoft Outlook 2007, we have selected a Per Installed Node license type.

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2. We wanted Altiris to link our Software Purchases to our Software Licenses for us. To do this we created a Software Purchase Search Rule. This is found on the Software Purchase tab when creating your new Software License.

1. On the Software Purchases tab click "Add new..." to add a new rule. This is used to link your SW Purchase (already setup in Step One) to your License entry.
2. Our Name and Version must be entered as it was on the Software Purchase creation. If you do not remember what you entered here go to your Software Purchase page in Altiris, right click on the Software Purchase and choose Edit to review.
3. Click Find to ensure that your Software Purchase(s) are found and linked
4. Click Ok.
   
   

   Click to view.

5. You will notice that your Rule is saved.
   
   

   Click to view.

6. To update your All Software Purchases section, click on the refresh button.
   
   

   Click to view.

3. In my opinion, the most important part of the Software License is the "Software Installs" tab. Here you will note all of your non-inventoried installs as well as (the more important) Software License Search Rules. Here is where you will specify the software foot printing which the software will be detected from.

For our example, we are going to update the Software License Search Rules as follows.

FILE NAME: outlook.exe
VERSION: 12.%

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Step Three: Checking Compliance

So by now you have setup your Software Purchase, setup your Software License with your foot printing and linking your Software Purchase, now you want to know if you are in compliance or not...

Once you have completed and saved your Software License a "Summary" tab will be available to you. This will show you your Purchased Licenses and your count of unique installs as you have defined them within your software foot printing (software installs tab). At the bottom it will give you a count of which you are in (or out) of compliance. (Note the 15 total purchased license count (this is from our quantity entry on the Software Purchase!!!)

Click to view.

See Altiris KB 24463 for more details.

Good luck!
-d