Licensed Software and Ownership of Purchase Details

The Administrator of the Centennial Discovery® Web Edition Control Center can distinguish between software products that require a license and those that do not. The way that licenses are added and reported depends on which category the software product is in. (By default, all products automatically require licenses. This can be changed in a number of ways, as explained in the Discovery Control Center help.)

For products that require a license, the license information must be entered manually for each product version. This is done in the Discovery Control Center as part of the Product Detail record. (A Purchase Detail relates to a piece of paper that authorizes you to use a product and will specify the number of licenses included.)

It is then straightforward to find out whether your organization is compliant for licensed software in terms of the number of licenses purchased and the number of copies installed by displaying the License compliance report by publisher or product in the Web Control Center.

Entering Purchase Details

How to enter a Purchase Detail is explained in the Discovery Control Center help.

The Purchase Detail includes a License Number and the Number of Licenses included with this number, Date of Purchase and Purchase Number. The Purchase Detail also has an owner as explained below.

Ownership of Licenses

A Purchase Detail, and therefore its license, is owned by a particular part of an organization - one of the Organizational Units (OUs) that have been set up for your company.

Each Purchase Detail will have been assigned to one of these OUs. It is vital that Purchase Details are assigned at the correct level because the organizational structure is taken into account in the Web Control Center when calculating the number of available licenses.

In the Software Compliance reports, the Licenses column shows the sum of all the licensable software. This is the sum of all Purchase Details that are at or below the current OU or are held by a direct ancestor of the OU in the organizational structure. This is because licenses assigned to the root of an organization can be used anywhere within the organization but those assigned at a particular OU can only be used at that level or below (that is, by one of the descendants/child OUs).

Example

For example, an organization is split into two OUs, Asia and Europe. Ten licenses are purchased at company level, 20 belong to the Asia OU and 15 to Europe. Then if you report:

  • At company level, the total available licenses are 45 (10 Company licenses + 20 in Asia + 15 in Europe)
  • On the Asia OU, the total available licenses reported is 30 (10 Company licenses + 20 in Asia)
  • On the Europe OU, the total available licenses reported is 25 (10 Company licenses + 15 in Europe)

Note that you cannot add the Asian and European available licenses to obtain the total of available licenses company-wide.

Version 6.1 / 2006.11

Reporting level

  • Global Manufacturing, Inc